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into English of two of Kerouac’s French novels appear in the Library of America volume, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings, in which I also contribute an extensive Translator’s Note.

Current projects include an extensive study of Kerouac as a bilingual novelist, translator, and archivist, as well as an exploration of recent posthumous publications in American letters 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.

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.