Renowned academic Biodun Jeyifo dies after brief illness

Professor Biodun Jeyifo, a renowned academic, literary critic, public intellectual, Marxist and committed trade unionist, has died at the age of 80 after a brief illness.

Jeyifo, widely known as BJ, died on Wednesday of renal failure, one month and five days after celebrating his 80th birthday in Lagos.

Born in Ibadan, Nigeria, he earned a first-class degree in English from the University of Ibadan in 1970. He obtained a master’s degree from the same institution in 1973 before completing his doctorate at New York University in 1975.

Jeyifo also received a Doctor of Letters (DLitt), honoris causa, from Obafemi Awolowo University, formerly the University of Ife, where he taught for several years. Reflecting on his time at the institution, he once remarked that it was at Ife that he became “the kind of teacher and person I had always tried to become.”

During a distinguished academic career, he held senior professorial positions at Cornell University and Harvard University. Until his death, he served as Professor Emeritus of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard.

His scholarship covered African and Caribbean Anglophone literatures, theatrical theory and dramatic literature across Western and non-Western traditions, comparative African and Afro-American critical thought, Marxist literary and cultural theory, colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as twentieth-century revolutionary social philosophy and literature.

Jeyifo was widely regarded as the leading scholarly authority on the works and career of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. His award-winning book, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), is considered one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated single-author studies in African postcolonial literary scholarship.

Further details of his funeral arrangements are expected to be announced by the family.