A renowned scholar, literary critic, public intellectual, Marxist, and committed trade unionist, Professor Biodun Jeyifo, often fondly called “BJ” by colleagues and students, has died at the age of 80.
BJ died on Wednesday, February, 2026, of renal failure, one month and five days after he celebrated his 80th birthday in Lagos.
BJ was born on Saturday, January 5, 1946, in Ibadan, where he had his formal education – primary, secondary, and tertiary.
He earned a PhD in 1975 from New York University, where Richard Schechner was his PhD supervisor; he had gained a master’s degree from the same university in 1973, and a bachelor’s in 1970 at the University of Ìbàdàn, where he graduated with first-class honours — the third in the university after Dan Izevbaye and Molara Ogundipe.
He also holds a D.Litt (honoris causa) from Ọbafẹmi Awolọwọ University. He has taught at Cornell University, Oberlin College, and Harvard University. Jeyifo was the first president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in Nigeria, when he taught at the University of Ife.
According to Cornell University, USA, “Professor Jeyifo is a leading literary critic and cultural theorist who has attained great prominence in African intellectual circles for his analysis of modernity and its attendant social and cultural crises. Editor of the authoritative anthology, Modern African Drama
(Norton Critical Editions, 2002), Jeyifo’s work has long framed scholarship in African drama and theater. His 1984 study of the Yoruba Popular Traveling Theatre is widely regarded as seminal in the study of African drama.
“Jeyifo’s early essays single-handedly shaped critical discourse on dramatic works by Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature and a fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research. His three subsequent books extending the scope of these essays have established him as a top interpreter of Soyinka. His most recent book, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), weighing Soyinka’s vast and complex body of work, is arguably the most sophisticated analysis of any single author in African literature.
“Jeyifo has also turned his attention to Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, writing a series of essays in the early 1990s that placed Achebe’s work, including Things Fall Apart, in an ideological and theoretical perspective not previously considered by other critics.”
