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.

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.

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.

[7] 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.

"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."

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.

[8] 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.

His major roles include, in the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences, Interim Director of African American Studies from 2009 to 2010,[14] Chair of the Department of English from 2011 to 2014, and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017.

The conclusion of the report prompted the university to appoint a university-wide associate provost for faculty diversity and inclusion and equivalent officers in each of BU's schools and colleges.

[17] In June 2017, Jarrett was named Seryl Kushner Dean of NYU's College of Arts and Science, and reports to the President and the Provost; his appointment began on September 1, 2017.

[19] Under Jarrett's leadership, CAS launched the first major and minor undergraduate degrees in data science on the New York City campus of NYU.

[22] CAS is also seeking to revise its general education requirements, including the Core Curriculum and system of First-Year Seminars, for the first time in over a decade.

[28] To support his writing of the biography, in 2010, Jarrett won the Walter Jackson Bate Fellowship in English Literature from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

[32] Jarrett is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, a module published online by Oxford University Press, and providing bibliographic articles that identify, organize, cite, and annotate scholarship on key areas of African American Studies—culture, politics, law, history, society, religion, and economics.