Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, where she teaches across the liberal arts. Her book Lost In Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (2020) has become standard reading for those seeking to revive liberal education in the face of the challenges of the moment. Translations of Lost in Thought have appeared in Farsi, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish, and are forthcoming in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, and Vietnamese.  In 2020, she received the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and founded the Catherine Project, an open liberal arts program for adults.

Hitz also writes for general audiences about the human questions at the core of revealed religion, as especially in her recent book, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life (2023). Her essays have been published in Chronicle Review, Commonweal, First Things, New Statesman, Plough, Tablet (UK), and the Washington Post. In the academic year 2023-24, she is jointly affiliated in the Madison Program and in the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion. She will be working on the philosophical distinction between knowledge and belief, in an effort to clarify and deepen the themes of Lost In Thought and their origins in her native field of scholarship, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.