Rate My Professor Gene Andrew Jarrett

Jarrett specializes in African American literary history from the eighteenth century to the present, U.S. literary history between the Civil War and World War II, race, ethnic, and cultural studies, and theories of literature, aesthetics, and intellectual historiography. He is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (NYU Press, 2011) and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). His third book, Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird (Princeton University Press, 2022), won the 2024 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and was named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year and a Book Riot Best Biography of the Year. Jarrett has edited eight books, including the two-volume Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature (2014), and serves as founding editor-in-chief of the Oxford Bibliographies module on African American studies and founding senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia in African American Literature and Culture. His scholarly work has been supported by fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2025, he was inducted into the American Academy of Science and Letters.