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Distinguished scholar and literary critic, Professor Biodun Jeyifo, has died at the age of 80. He died on Wednesday in Lagos, just weeks after marking his 80th birthday in January.
News of his death was confirmed the same day in a statement by Professor Andrew Haruna, President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL).
Popularly known as BJ, Jeyifo was widely regarded as one of the most significant voices in African literary criticism and arguably the most influential single-author intellectual in the field.
At the time of his death, he served concurrently as Emeritus Professor of English and African Literature at Cornell University and Professor of African and American Studies at Harvard University.
Born in Nigeria, Jeyifo graduated with a First Class degree in English from the University of Ibadan in 1970. He completed his Master’s degree there in 1973 before earning a PhD from Cornell University in 1975.
He was recognised internationally as a foremost authority on the works of Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka. His landmark book, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism, is considered by many scholars to be among the most sophisticated critical studies of any African writer’s oeuvre.
Beyond his extensive work on Soyinka, Jeyifo also produced influential scholarship on Professor Chinua Achebe and other leading African writers. His work was consistently praised for its intellectual depth, analytical rigour, originality and sustained scholarly dedication.
Professor Jeyifo was also celebrated as a devoted and exacting teacher. Many colleagues referred to him as a “professor of professors,” reflecting the generations of academics he mentored, particularly within the humanities.
Paying tribute during Jeyifo’s 80th birthday celebration, one of his mentees, Chidi Amuta, wrote: “BJ [Biodun Jeyifo], as a teacher of literature, was marked out not only by the ideological departure of his pedagogy, but by the depth, rigour and originality of his scholarship”.
