Richard Alan Macksey (July 25, 1931 – July 22, 2019[1][2]) was Professor of Humanities and co-founder and longtime Director of the Humanities Center (now the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature) at The Johns Hopkins University, where he taught critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies.
He was the longtime Comparative Literature editor of MLN (Modern Language Notes), published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Macksey also presided over one of the largest private libraries in Maryland, with over 70,000 books and manuscripts.
[3] As Director for the Humanities Center, Macksey, with funding from the Ford Foundation, organized the influential international literary theory symposium, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," which featured prominent academics such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, and where Derrida presented his lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", credited with "tear[ing] down the temple of structuralism."
[4] In 1999 the Richard A. Macksey Professorship for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities was established by a former student Edward T. Dangel III and his wife, Bonni Widdoes.