Rate My Professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, M.A. from SUNY Buffalo, and B.A. in Liberal Arts and English from Concordia University, Montréal, Québec. While at Columbia, he worked as an archivist in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, processing collections including those of Samuel Roth, Erica Jong, and Barney Rosset, former publisher of Grove Press. His research focuses on 20th-century and contemporary American literature, African American and ethnic American literatures, comics studies, cinema and media studies, history of material texts, modernism, transatlantic studies, translation, speculative fiction, and aging, with particular attention to archival practices and textual recovery in works by authors such as Jack Kerouac and Claude McKay.

Cloutier is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2019), which won the Modern Language Association’s Matei Calinescu Prize, the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize, the Society of American Archivists’ Waldo Gifford Leland Award in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. He co-edited Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem (Penguin Classics, 2017), edited Jack Kerouac’s original French writings in La vie est d’hommage (Boréal, 2016; compact edition 2022) and Sur le Chemin (Gallimard, 2023), and provided translations for The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (Library of America, 2016). His forthcoming monograph, Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac (Columbia University Press, 2026), is supported by a 2025 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He has published articles in American Literary History, Modernism/Modernity, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Cinema Journal, and others, contributed to the Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem exhibition catalogue (2016), and appeared in media including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Le Monde, and podcasts such as Novel Dialogue.