Birth Date: 07/31/1945
Deceased Date: 01/01/2024
James N. Creech died on January 1, 2024, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was born on July 31, 1945, in Smithfield, North Carolina, and graduated from Smithfield High School and the University of North Carolina. He earned a doctorate in French from Cornell University in 1975, and then became a professor of French literature at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His survivors include Susan Helen Creech Broome, his sister; Robert Wayne Broome, Jr., his brother-in-law; two nephews, Robert W. Broome III (wife Mimi) and Jonathan Scott Broome (wife Christy); and one niece, Elizabeth Helen Broome Kaiser (husband Andrew), all of Hickory, North Carolina.
Jim came of age professionally in the heyday of French intellectual dominance, with which he maintained an intense and ambivalent relationship, and went on to shape generations of scholars through his teaching, writing, lectures, and personal interactions. His style was often dazzling, combining rigor, concision and wit with an endless curiosity that led him to write on an extraordinary span of subjects and individuals. He had little patience for those who mistook their entitlement for personal merit, whom he dismissed as blowhards and bloviators, and turned his interest instead toward the dispossessed, the repressed and the rejected of society. He began classically, with a book on the enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot in 1986, which he followed up on, in 1993, with a book on the cryptic sexual undercurrents informing one of the American novelist Herman Melville’s most complicated and puzzling novels, Pierre. Then he turned his attention to survivors of World War II concentration camps, whom he interviewed and befriended, and the ways that the repression of gay sexuality shaped twentieth-century French theories about literature and culture, which he called “the French closet.” Committed to clarity of ideas and, even more, to the human beings in and behind them, his thinking was self-critical and often lapidary. He could do more with a quip – such as the title to one of his lectures (“Why Is the Cutting Edge So Dull?”) or quick observation (“Sometimes no answer is an answer”) than others could do in pages. Jim retired as professor emeritus in 2011, after promotions to Associate and Full Professor, and serving as Chair of the French Department.
Jim was a lover of music, especially chamber music recitals and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra concerts at Music Hall. He loved the history and nineteenth-century architecture in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, where he restored and lived in an 1847 house built by abolitionist Samuel Lewis.
