It is with great sadness that we announce that Exeter College Honorary Fellows and alumni Pierre Audi (1975, Oriental Studies) and Professor Joe Nye (1958, PPE) have died — Mr Audi on 3 May and Professor Nye on 6 May 2025. Both will be greatly missed.
Pierre Audi was born in Beirut on 9 November 1957 and went on to be an ebullient and influential opera director who founded the Almeida Theatre in a derelict former warehouse in north London. He attended Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school in Paris, before reading Oriental Studies at Exeter in 1975. It was during his time at Oxford that he discovered his true passion by directing Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the Oxford Playhouse.
He left the Almeida for the Netherlands and in 2008 he added the Holland Festival to his portfolio. Two years later he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He also joined Park Avenue Armory, a New York arts centre, where in 2023 he evoked the hastily erected field hospitals of the coronavirus years by filling the vast drill hall with hospital beds for a staged performance of Schubert’s lieder by the tenor Jonas Kaufmann. He was also Artistic Director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival.
He died suddenly of a heart attack in Beijing, where he had been working on a production, and is survived by his wife, Marieke Peters, whom he married in 2015, and their two children. Sadly, the College saw little of Pierre due to his international work commitments; but those who knew him as an alumnus and Honorary Fellow will not quickly forget his passion and energy.
Professor Joe Nye was born in the United States on 19 January 1937 and went on to be an eminent political scientist and highly respected commentator on international affairs. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of ‘neoliberalism’, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. He initially went to Morristown Prep in Morristown, New Jersey, before attending Princeton University, from where he graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history in 1958.
Thereafter, he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics as a Rhodes Scholar at Exeter in 1958. He obtained his PhD in political science from Harvard University in 1964. In a stellar career, he was ranked as one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Top Global Thinkers and was Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a member both of the Carter and Clinton administrations.
In 2013 he published Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era and, most recently, published his autobiography (A Life in the American Century), with a section on Exeter, in 2023. Professor Nye was a proud Honorary Fellow and regular visitor to the College. Professionally active to the very end and a wonderfully rounded and warm person, he will be greatly missed. He is survived by his wife, Molly, and three adult sons.
The College sends its heartfelt condolences to the families, friends, and colleagues of Professor Nye and Mr Audi. Exeter is proud to have counted both among its Honorary Fellows and mourns their loss with deep respect and gratitude.
