Jean-Christophe Cloutier received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an M.A. from SUNY Buffalo, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts and English from Concordia University, Montréal, in his native Québec (Canada). At Columbia, he also worked as an archivist in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library where, among other collections, he processed the papers of Samuel Roth, Erica Jong, and former publisher of Grove Press, Barney Rosset.

He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2019), which won the fifth annual Matei Calinescu Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the MSA 2019 First Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association, and the 2020 Waldo Gifford Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists; it was also shortlisted for the 2020 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. The book 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.

After years of archival excavation and textual reconstruction, he edited 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 his edition of Kerouac’s longest novel written in French Canuck (“joual québécois”), Sur le Chemin (Gallimard, 2023). His 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into English of two of Kerouac’s French novels appear in the Library of America volume, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings, for which he also contributed an extensive Translator’s introduction.

Building on the recovery of Jack Kerouac’s previously-unknown French manuscripts, Cloutier is currently completing his next monograph, Big American Writer: Jack Kerouac, Bilingualism, and the Archive.This project 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, this project hopes to 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.

Cloutier is concurrently working on “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.

In 2017, Cloutier co-edited a scholarly edition of Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem (Penguin Classics, 2017; paperback 2018), a previously unknown novel McKay composed in 1941. Edited in collaboration with Brent Hayes Edwards, the volume provides extensive historical contextualization of the novel's composition and a discussion of its implications for our understanding of McKay's late career. In 2021, the edition appeared in French translation: Les Brebis Noires de Dieu (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Place).

His work is featured in the catalogue, Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem, published by Steidl in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation and The Art Institute of Chicago. This catalogue accompanies a photography exhibition at the AIC that was held from May 21 to August 28, 2016, and for which Cloutier acted as consultant and contributor.

In addition to abiding interests in translation, speculative fiction, and aging, his teaching and research fall largely within 20th Century and contemporary American literature, and also involve popular culture, notably comics and cinema. Here at Penn, he regularly teaches comics studies and has been co-teaching, with cartoonist extraordinaire Rob Berry, a creative writing seminar on “Making Comics.” 

His essays, reviews, and translations have been published in Modernism/Modernity, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Cinema Journal, Transition, Public Books, Journal of Beat Studies, The Capilano Review, Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Heroes & Superheroes, A Time for the Humanities, UMBR(a), Transmission II, and others. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), The Village Voice, Hyperallergic, BOMB magazine, The Guardian, Paste Magazine, Le Monde, Le Figaro, TV5 Monde, The Walrus, Maclean’s, Radio-Canada, Le Devoir, La Presse, Les Lettres Françaises, and several other media outlets.