Gene Andrew Jarrett

Gene Andrew Jarrett (born April 21, 1975) is an American professor, literary scholar, and academic administrator.

He is Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University.

Prior to his current role at Princeton, Jarrett was the Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science (CAS) and Professor of English at New York University.

Jarrett was born on April 21, 1975, in New York City to Jamaican immigrants.

His parents instilled him with strong values of hard work and education.

"They were always talking about how education is a pathway toward opportunities," he mentioned in an interview.

"My father used to say to me: the harder you work, the luckier you get."

Jarrett attended Stuyvesant High School, where he explored his dual academic interests in English and Mathematics.

The long commute from the Bronx and challenging curriculum were obstacles that "you just had to persevere through," he remembered.

Despite the obstacles, he recalled Stuyvesant High School fondly.

"[At Stuyvesant], there were a lot of people who excelled in their studies and it made me appreciate how important it was to bring a certain degree of intellectual intensity and energy to whatever I did."

In 1993, Jarrett matriculated at Princeton University.

Since Princeton does not allow students to have more than one concentration, he earned three certificates of proficiency in American Studies, African American Studies, and Applied and Computational Mathematics.

Jarrett graduated with an A.B. in English after completing a 95-page-long senior thesis, titled "The Narrative Economy of Race in the Novels of William Faulkner," under the supervision of Eduardo Cadava.

Jarrett was drawn especially to African American studies: "Because I am a person of African descent, the issues regarding race and culture interested me in terms of understanding the world in which I lived and gave me a chance to learn more about myself."

While at Princeton Jarrett became a fellow of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program.

"The professional relationships I established as an undergraduate through Mellon Mays have persisted for decades," he recalled.

As a student he was especially influenced by the Princeton professors who focused on the lives of African Americans, including philosopher Cornel West, biographer Arnold Rampersad, and the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.

Morrison was one of his professors during both his junior and senior years.

After five years at Brown, he earned his doctorate in English in 2002.

As Jarrett was finishing his doctorate at Brown, he received job offers to be an assistant professor of English from Boston University and the University of Maryland, College Park.

In 2002, Jarrett chose the University of Maryland to start his career as a professor.

He earned tenure there within five years, by the age of 32.

Upon receiving tenure at the University of Maryland, Boston University reached out again.

The offer of a tenured professorship in the English Department, with a joint appointment in the Program in African American Studies, finally lured him to BU.

His major roles include, in the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences, Interim Director of African American Studies from 2009 to 2010, Chair of the Department of English from 2011 to 2014, and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017.

As Associate Dean for the Humanities, Jarrett regularly lobbied as a Massachusetts delegate of the National Humanities Alliance on Capitol Hill for greater federal funding of the humanities, which had for years been contending with threatened budget cuts.

Prior to that, he worked at Boston University, where he served as Chair of the English Department from 2011 to 2014 and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017.

At BU he was a professor in the Department of English and the Program in African American Studies.

Before that, he was a professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jarrett is the author of three books of African American literary studies, and the editor or co-editor of eight additional books of African American literature and literary criticism.

He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Oxford Bibliographies module on African American Studies, published by Oxford University Press.

For his scholarly work he has won a number of awards and distinguished fellowships.

Within five years, in early 2012, he was promoted to full professor at the age of 36, making him one of the youngest faculty at that rank in the entire University.

After a decade, Jarrett left BU for NYU, where his appointment as Professor of English accompanied his appointment as Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science.

Over the course of his career Jarrett has served in academic administration.

"The NEH and NEA are crucial for supporting not only the scholarly or creative work of faculty in higher education, especially at BU," he said in 2017, "but they also fund the programming outside of our academic walls, such as public libraries and museums, which advance the early education of children and the civic education of people living in our communities. Slashing the support of these endowments would undercut the robust educational apparatus, with its attention to the diverse and free expression of ideas, that has distinguished our civic society since the Congressional creation of these endowments in 1965."

"She had blackboards in her office," he recalled during an interview after she had passed away on August 5, 2019, "and she would have these kind of looping, perfectly proportional, symmetrical letters, and she would write these gorgeous words."

Jarrett said that when he decided to pursue a graduate degree "[Morrison] agreed to write me a letter of recommendation. And so, if it werenʼt for her, I wouldnʼt be where I am today."

By the time Jarrett graduated from Princeton, he had won an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and decided to pursue doctoral study in English language and literature at Brown University.