Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
reception to follow at the A.D. White House
Biodun Jeyifo
Professor of African and African American Studies and of Literature and Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Biodun Jeyifo taught at Cornell University as Professor of English for eighteen years before departing for Harvard in July 2006. He had previously taught at Oberlin College and at the University of Ibadan and the University of Ife in his native Nigeria. Between 1980 and 1982, he served as the National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the country’s professional association of teaching and research faculty; in this position, he helped to shape state policy in the direction of consolidation of academic autonomy and adequate funding of tertiary education in Nigeria. Professor Jeyifo works on the complex connections between literature, critical theory, radical humanities scholarship, and twentieth century progressive and revolutionary social philosophy. His most recent book-length publication, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), won one of the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Texts (OATS) awards for 2005.
