James M. Redfield, a Greek scholar and award-winning professor, dies at 91

Redfield is remembered as a profoundly original thinker and encouraging teacher.

The night before he died, James M. Redfield’s son handed him an unmarked text of Plato’s Republic. Redfield opened it to where he had left off several weeks before, reading and translating it to his son and the hospice nurse, offering options for alternate translations.

It was an apt use of time for the 91-year-old scholar, a man who engaged with his work in new ways, always rethinking and reprocessing. Redfield, the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Classical Languages and Literatures, in the Committee on Social Thought, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College, passed away on Thursday, May 28.

“Redfield was a profoundly original, incisive, and intuitive anthropologist who worked above all on the ancient Greeks, especially their philosophical and literary texts and their religion,” says Glenn W. Most, a visiting professor on the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and previously professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. “His uniquely personal approach, untrammeled by doctrinaire theories and energized by his fascination with trying to understand both what it was that people — including himself — thought they were doing and what it was that they were really doing, had a profound impact on everyone who read his writings or who experienced him in the classroom.”

Redfield was born in Chicago in 1935, spending his early years living at ethnographic field sites in Yucatan, Guatemala, and China with his father and mother, anthropologists Robert Redfield and Margaret Park Redfield. He credited a trip to Florence, Italy, at the age of 13 with sparking his interest in Italy, Greece, and the ancient world. Redfield received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1954 before studying at New College, Oxford, from 1956 to 1958. He received his Ph.D. from UChicago in 1961 and joined the faculty in 1960 at age 25. He was awarded tenure concurrently with becoming the Master of the New Collegiate Division in 1968. He wasn’t the first in his family to teach at UChicago: His father taught anthropology and ethnolinguistics, and served as dean of the Division of the Social Sciences from 1934 to 1946. His maternal grandfather, Robert E. Park, taught sociology at UChicago from 1914 to 1933 and played a key role in the Chicago School of Sociology. 

During his career, Redfield authored three books: Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector; The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy; and Plato’s Seventh Letter, which was published just this past March. Nature and Culture, which placed an anthropological perspective on the role of Hector in the Iliad,in particular had an enormous impact on the field of classics, shifting the way people thought about the structure and sense of the epic poem. He also wrote and spoke on Homer, Herodotus, Plato, and Greek society. Two of his early lectures are memorialized in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, included in their Chicago Lectures collection. In his teaching, he focused on Greek language, literature, and social theory.

“He was beholden to no school, but he was open to all manner of influences and conversations,” says Laura M. Slatkin, a visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Gallatin Distinguished Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University. “He combined anthropological sensitivity with this real philological and linguistic brilliance, and very profound interpretive subtlety. And he was a beautiful writer.”

Before his retirement in 2016, Redfield held the unique distinction of being a two-time winner of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, first in 1965 and again in 1987. In class, he is remembered for encouraging his students with challenging questions, helping them develop their own line of thought.

“There was no student who was so ill-informed or so confused that Redfield could not find what was valuable, even if entirely inchoate, in his desire to learn,” Most recalls. “His patience even with the most arrogant students was humbling.”

His lectures were also highly regarded — and sometimes deftly designed in the moment. Chris Faraone, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College, recalls an instance when Redfield forgot it was his turn to teach their shared course one day, but was able to immediately bring the lesson to life.

“He walks back and forth in front of the blackboard three times, and then he starts this amazing lecture on the topic (death and funerary rituals),” Faraone says. “But he starts it with an anecdote about his mother's funeral, and a dream he had about his mother. It was just amazing. I wish I had a tape recorder for that.”

Slatkin says she was riveted by the first lecture she saw Redfield give, and he eventually convinced her to come to UChicago to teach. She says Redfield was naturally eloquent and articulate — and always original, “never secondhand.”

“This is why I used to tease him,” Faraone says. “Because he loved Homer so much, I used to say, You know, you are like an oral performer. You can just get up and give these amazing lectures, and then he thinks, ‘I've given the lecture, it was fun. I'll move on to the next thing.’”

Faraone says many student dissertations were likely inspired by a question or comment from Redfield, and it would become stuck in their minds. In a Summer 2015 issue of CORE Magazine, Redfield said, “Teaching is not an art, exactly, it’s not a skill. It’s a relationship.”

One such impactful student relationship was with Bruce M. King, of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, who co-edited Thinking the Greeks: A Volume in Honor of James M. Redfield. The book is a collection of essays exploring themes that Redfield studied throughout his career: Homer, Plato, Philostratus, and beyond. King met Redfield as an undergraduate, and the late professor became King’s academic advisor. The two maintained their connection long after, which included a trip to Greece and Turkey where they explored ancient sites relevant to their scholarship.

“Jamie always made it clear that he wasn't looking for acolytes or for people who are going to think like Jamie thought,” King says. “He was interested in people who could think their own way through, and he was there to help you with it and suggest and read. I found that liberating. It could be challenging, but eventually you found your way — and it was genuinely your way. I think that's pretty rare.”

Redfield was disinterested in his students regurgitating his work as much as he was unlikely to be repetitious himself. He was rarely — if ever — repetitious, his friends and colleagues say, choosing instead to engage with his studies anew to develop original perspectives. 

But with his intellectual intensity also came a sense of humor. One notable example is a 1997 essay he wrote, which appeared in The Point in 2023, in which he addresses the ideas of celebrity and the shadow self by way of his envy of the other James Redfield, author of the best-selling Celestine Prophecy — a book he didn’t much care for. The scholar would often receive the novelist’s invitations and fan mail, mistakenly addressed to him, and he described the comedy of errors that resulted from intentionally accepting one of those wrong-Redfield invitations.

In addition to his scholarship, Redfield was also part of Hyde Park’s Last Stage, an independent storefront theater company founded in the 1950s by Court Theatre and other University of Chicago associates. The Last Stage produced Redfield’s adaptations and original translations of Aristophanes' The Clouds and The Frogs. He took Shakespeare acting classes and performed in three productions with Hyde Park Community Players, including playing the lead role of Robert in David Auburn’s Proof. He was known for his cooking and a love for his dogs.

Redfield is survived by three children: Emily Gilliam, James Adam Redfield, and Claire K. Redfield. His oldest son, Robert Redfield, passed away in 2020. Jamie is also survived by three grandchildren: Isaac Redfield, Amy Cordelia Redfield Ochs. and Levi Redfield Ochs.