I am a Québécois scholar, archivist, translator, and professor of literature. My research and teaching interests span across Twentieth-Century & Contemporary North American Literature, African American Literature, Material Text/Book History, Comics Studies, Translation, Film, Francophone literature, the Beats, and Popular Culture.

I received my Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where I interned as an archivist in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Up there in the quiet darkness of the upper-floor stacks I processed, among other collections, the papers of the infamous publisher Samuel Roth, the fearless writer Erica Jong, and the rebel publisher of Grove Press, Barney Rosset. These experiences sealed my scholarly fate as a lifelong devotee of the archive.

I am the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia UP, 2019), which won the Modern Language Association’s fifth annual Matei Calinescu Prize, the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize, the 2020 Waldo Gifford Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists, and was shortlisted for the 2020 ASAP Book Prize.

In 2016, I had the pleasure of serving as a contributor and consultant to The Art institute of Chicago’s award-winning exhibition of “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem” and its accompanying catalog. 

In 2017, I coedited, with Brent Hayes Edwards, Claude McKay’s long-lost novel, Amiable with Big Teeth, for Penguin Classics—this edition has now been translated into French as Les Brebis Noires de Dieu (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Place, 2021).

After years of archival excavation and textual reconstruction, I edited the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, La vie est d’hommage (Boréal, 2016)—this French-language volume is now available in Boréal’s “COMPACT” format (2022). In October 2023, the French publisher Gallimard released my edition of Kerouac’s longest novel written in French Canuck (“joual québécois”), Sur le Chemin (Gallimard, 2023). My translations into English of two of Kerouac’s French novels appear in the Library of America volume, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings, in which I also contribute an extensive Translator’s Note.

Building on the recovery of Jack Kerouac’s previously-unknown French manuscripts, my current project, Big American Writer: Jack Kerouac, Bilingualism, and the Archive, aims to reposition Kerouac in his actual geopolitical and cultural-linguistic reality as a minoritarian, bilingual, and bi-cultural author, rather than as the mythic “King of the Beats” forever hitchhiking on the road. Born Jean-Louis Kérouac of immigrant parents from Québec, his French-Canadian upbringing and bilingualism are formative to his breakthrough achievements as a new kind of North American writer. In producing this new critical reassessment of Kerouac’s oeuvre as an embodiment of the Franco-American experience within continental North America, my project can hopefully carve a path for the long-awaited reinscription and inclusivity of French-Canadian heritage—and the French language writ large—in American Studies and further enrich, and complicate, the American tapestry. This project is supported by a 2025 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as a University Research Foundation Grant from the University of Pennsylvania.

Other projects include “Posthumousness: Recovery and Restoration in American Letters,” an exploration of recent posthumous publications in American literature and the complex network of excavation involved in bringing these new/old works to a wider public—book collectors and auctioneers, literary estates and copyright law, librarians and archival repositories, editors and publishers, and more. An article from this project, “Posthumous in Marseille: Claude McKay’s Translational Provenance(s)",” is forthcoming from American Literary History in 2025, for their special issue on the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance.

My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Le Monde, TV5 Monde, Le Figaro, The Village Voice, Hyperallergic, BOMB magazine, Paste Magazine, Maclean’s, Le Devoir, La Presse, The Globe and Mail, Les Lettres Françaises, and several other media outlets.