Jarrod Hayes

In addition to being a television crime drama junky, Jarrod Hayes first became interested in scholarship on crime fiction in relation to studying and teaching the French New Novel, particularly Michel Butor’s 1957 L’emploi du temps, translated into English as Passing Time. This novel offers a theorization of the detective that allowed Hayes, in his second book, Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree (University of Michigan Press, 2016), to explore the way in which the work of finding and returning to one’s roots resembles the work of the detective in that both involve returns to the beginnings of their own stories, beginnings that only become beginnings through their placement in the story that the detective’s job is to tell.

Hayes’s current research interests include transnational comparative approaches to crime fiction and the role of representations of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in crime fiction.