Biodun Jeyifo, a Nigerian literary critic and scholar who specialized in world Anglophone literature and culture, died Feb. 11, 2026, of renal failure. He was 80.
Early in his career, Jeyifo served as the first National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities in Nigeria. As a Marxist literary critic, he focused his work on the cultural crises of capitalist modernity, earning a reputation in post-colonial studies for his attention to dispersed strands of thinking alongside scholars such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak.
The scholar later held professorships at Cornell University and Harvard University. In 2004, he published "Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism," a study that won the American Library Association's Outstanding Academic Texts award. The book provided a comprehensive analysis of the 1986 Nobel laureate’s career, challenging earlier views that Soyinka’s writing was intentionally obscure.
Jeyifo concluded his career as Professor Emeritus of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard. His work remains the most sophisticated single-author study of any writer in the field of African postcolonial studies.