Fredric Jameson, In Memoriam, 1934-2024

Fredric Jameson, a cultural theorist and literary critic who influenced generations of scholars and helped raise the international profile of Duke University's Literature program, died on September 22.

The Program in Literature mourns the loss of our colleague and friend.

"For decades, Mr. Jameson’s voluminous work — more than 30 books and edited collections as well as reams of journal articles — has been required reading for graduate students (and some precocious undergraduates), not just in literature but also in film studies, architecture and history."
-from The New York Times Obituary

Overview of the the room filled at a memorial to Jameson

Watch the Memorial Event

On November 22, the Department of Literature hosted a memorial for friends and colleagues from around the world to share in memories of Fredric Jameson.

The wide reach and generosity of his contributions to the intellectual life of the Humanities and the University as a whole are reflected by the co-sponsorships from the departments of English, Romance Studies, African and African American Studies, Slavic and Eurasian Studies, German Studies, History, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Philosophy, Music, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Religious Studies, Classical Studies, International Comparative Studies, Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Marxism and Society, and the Institute for Critical Theory, as well as the Offices of the Dean and the Provost.

Tributes from Colleagues

“Since his arrival at Duke, Fred Jameson has been the centerpiece in the project that catapulted the humanities at Duke to national leadership.” -Michael Hardt, Professor and Chair of Literature

“In the 1980s, he created the Literature Program at Duke in his image: a broad, welcoming home to faculty and students interested in analyzing and historicizing not just literature, film, and culture, but the world we live in. The atmosphere of complete intellectual freedom he fostered enabled me to find my own intellectual voice. It’s difficult to fathom that Fred no longer shares our world. But his work will live on." -Toril Moi, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature

“Fred Jameson was the ultimate mentor in that he opened up every horizon for research, not just for those of us he taught directly, but for anyone who had access to his titanic body of work. He embodied the generosity and expansiveness of his own ideas, paying attention to every new student as he did to every new text and tradition. He kept going and growing because there was always more to learn.”-Jed Esty, Ph.D. '96, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania