Renowned scholar and literary critic Professor Biodun Jeyifo Prof. Biodun Jeyifo, has died on Wednesday, at the age of 80.
Andrew Haruna, and one of his former students at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Prof. Wunmi Raji, confirmed that he passed away in Ibadan on February 11.
Fondly called BJ, Professor Jeyifo was widely regarded as perhaps the most influential single-author intellectual in African literary criticism.
Until his death, he held the concurrent positions of Emeritus Professor of English and African Literature at Cornell University and Professor of African and American Studies at Harvard University.
Born in Nigeria, Jeyifo earned a First Class Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Ibadan in 1970. He obtained a Master’s degree from the same institution in 1973 and later earned his PhD from Cornell University in 1975.
Professor Jeyifo was a leading authority on the works of Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka.
His seminal study, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism, has been described by many scholars as arguably the most sophisticated analysis of any African writer’s body of work.
Beyond Soyinka, he was also recognised for his critical works on Professor Chinua Achebe and other African literary geniuses. His scholarship has been widely praised for its depth, rigour, originality, and painstaking intellectual commitment.
Professor Jeyifo is remembered as a hardworking, thorough, and deeply committed teacher of literature. Colleagues often described him as a “professor of professors,” having mentored and nurtured generations of academics, particularly in the humanities.
One of his mentees, Chidi Amuta, during Jeyifo’s 80th birthday celebration, 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”.
