News and views for the UB community
profile
Diane Christian (left) and Bruce Jackson pictured during a Vimeo introduction for a recent Buffalo Film Seminar.
By CHARLES ANZALONE
Published May 15, 2026
SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian — half of what could be the most accomplished and enduring husband-wife teams ever at UB — shakes her head slightly when asked what message she and her husband, fellow SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson, would tell a community that has been their academic and personal home for more than half a century.
“It’s hard to sum up a life,” says Christian.
If that’s true for anyone, imagine whittling it down for Jackson and Christian.
Their shared legacy reaches across classrooms, scholarship and Buffalo’s cultural life.
This fall marks Jackson’s 60th and Christian’s 56th year as UB faculty members. Jackson turns 90 in June; Christian is 86. They’ve been close with every UB president except one — Clifford Furnas — since the private University of Buffalo joined the SUNY system in 1962. They’re a comprehensive part of UB’s history, an influential institutional presence.
Christian and Jackson pictured in their home (left) and during a 2016 Buffalo Film Seminar at the Amherst Theatre.
Both Jackson and Christian are passionate UB and Western New York backers, deferring much of their acclaim by citing their surroundings.
“Buffalo was just the perfect place,” Jackson says more than once.
“For me, too,” says Christian.
“It was just the perfect marriage of the town, university and my temperament,” Jackson says.
The university’s willingness to let them pursue their academic interests, coupled with the opportunity to influence Buffalo’s cultural institutions, are two of the main reasons they chose to build their careers in Buffalo.
They inspire intellectual ambition and expressive thinking in their students. Alongside their many accomplishments, Jackson and Christian have also become known for their distinctive voices and personalities.
Photos courtesy of Bruce Jackson.
“When I first arrived at the University at Buffalo in 1973, Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson were at the center of everything that was happening in the arts and intellectual scene at UB and in the larger community that had grown around that scene,” R.D. Pohl, longtime former editor of The Buffalo News poetry section and a well-known name in Buffalo’s literary and arts world, wrote in an email to UBNow. “Fifty-three years later, they are still prolific and central figures in that scene.”
Pohl called them “anchor figures” in UB’s prestigious and hip literary hotbed that lasted decades. They were “wise, witty, generous and gregarious eminences, archivists, documentarians, curators and hosts in the social scene that evolved here in Buffalo around the intellectual and creative ferment.”
“It is rare for any individual — much less a couple of creative partners and collaborators — to remain at the center of the light and generative energy emanating from any arts and intellectual community for six decades,” wrote Pohl. “But that is precisely what Bruce and Diane have been in Buffalo, and what they remain to this day.”
They clearly enjoy each other’s company, finishing one another’s sentences and readily deflecting credit to the other. Jackson still delights in telling playful stories about his wife, adding another dimension to his admiration for her. Both are master storytellers. Ask them about being guests in Clint Eastwood’s home soon after they took part in the premiere of Eastwood’s “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” or about the days when Jackson would glance through the classroom window at Christian when they were colleagues in the Department of English.
Their Buffalo home itself shows the breadth and energy of their intellectual and social lives. There’s a haunting, original portrait of silent film icon Louise Brooks that was given to them by Brooks’ lover and supporter James Card, founder of the Motion Pictures Collection at the George Eastman Museum, who led seminars in Buffalo at Jackson and Christian’s invitation.
It’s just one of the photographs, paintings and objets d’art inside their historic Delaware District house, where the couple has lived for 51 years. They hosted numerous summer parties that were almost performance art, illustrating the scope of the couple’s artistic and community acquaintances. But perhaps the strongest sense of who they are emerges in the way they talk about life and each other.
On their enduring relationship:
“One thing unusual is we spend most of our time together and are quite happy doing it,” Jackson says.
“One friend of ours said, ‘It’s not natural,’” Christian says. “‘Not normal.’”
“If you get married,” Jackson says, “get married to someone you like talking to.”
On students seeking a life path:
“Follow, your curiosity,” says Jackson.
“Follow your curiosity,” repeats Christian. “Follow your heart. Don’t give up those good feelings.”
On retirement:
“People ask if we’re going to retire, and we both say ‘why?’” says Jackson. He quotes a movie scene from “The Wild Bunch.” William Holden’s and Ernest Borgnine’s characters are drinking late at night after a failed bank robbery.
“Someday I want to make a big score and back off,” says Pike Bishop, Holden’s character.
“Back off to what?” Borgnine’s character asks.
Christian puts it more directly.
“So many people have said to us — (Nobel laureate) Herbert Hauptman, for example, Leslie Fieldler, for example, they hated retirement — ‘Don’t do it.’
“We hope to die in the saddle.”