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.

My latest book, Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac, is forthcoming in October 2026 with Columbia UP. The book repositions 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. This project was supported by a University Research Foundation Grant from the University of Pennsylvania, and was awarded a 2025 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Big American Writer marks the culmination of years of archival excavation and textual reconstruction that began with my edition of the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, La vie est d’hommage (Boréal, 2016)—this French-language volume is also 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into English of two of Kerouac’s French novels appear in the Library of America volume, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings, for which I also penned an extensive Translator’s Introduction.

I also just released, in August 2026, an audiobook of Kerouac’s French texts titled, Sur le chemin et autres écrits en français (Boréal, Studio Bulldog). I both produced and directed this audio edition that brings together diverse readers from multiple French collectivities of the Americas—including Acadia, Ontario, Québec, Nitassinan, Louisiana, Franco-America, and Haiti. The audiobook is now available on most platforms around the world.

Last year, I had the pleasure of appearing in Ebs Burnough’s documentary, Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation (Universal/Ventureland, 2025), which held its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. The cast includes: Josh Brolin, W. Kamau Bell, Matt Dillon, Michael Imperioli, Ann Charters, Joyce Johnson, Jay McInerney, Natalie Merchant, and David Amram. Now available for streaming.

My first monograph, Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia UP, 2019), focuses on the archival investments of midcentury African American novelists and engages with several newly-discovered primary texts as it sketches the troubled history of black special collections in the U.S. The book was awarded the Modern Language Association’s fifth annual Matei Calinescu Prize, the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize, and the 2020 Waldo Gifford Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists (the only book of literary criticism to receive this honor). It was also 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).

Current 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)",” recently appeared in American Literary History (Fall 2025), for their special issue on the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance.

When I get a chance, I also try to write about the comics and films I love.

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, France Culture, The Globe and Mail, Les Lettres Françaises, and several other media outlets.