Gene Andrew

Jarrett

As Dean of the Faculty, Gene Andrew Jarrett oversees and supports Princeton’s faculty, professional researchers, professional specialists and professional librarians.

Jarrett began his appointment as dean and as the William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University on Aug. 1, 2021. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from Princeton University and his Master of Arts and doctorate in English from Brown University.

Before Jarrett’s current role at Princeton, he was the Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science and Professor of English at New York University. Prior to that, he worked at Boston University, where he was a professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Program in African American Studies; he also served as chair of the English department and associate dean of the faculty for the humanities. He began his academic career as an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

For Jarrett’s scholarship, he has won awards from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author or editor of 11 acclaimed books of African American literary studies; his most recent is “Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird,” a comprehensive biography published by Princeton University Press that won the 2024 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and was named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, a Book Riot Best Biography of the Year, and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Oxford Bibliographies module on African American studies and the founding senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia in African American Literature and Culture, both published by Oxford University Press. In 2025, Dean Jarrett was inducted into the American Academy of Science and Letters.