Rate My Professor Gene Andrew Jarrett

Gene Andrew Jarrett is Dean of the Faculty and the William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University, a role he has held since August 2021. He earned his AB in English from Princeton University and his AM and PhD in English from Brown University. Prior to returning to Princeton, Jarrett served as the Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and Professor of English at New York University from 2017 to 2021. At Boston University, he was a professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Program in African American Studies, chair of the English department from 2011 to 2014, and associate dean of the faculty for the humanities from 2014 to 2017. He began his academic career as an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 2002 to 2007.

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.