This emphasis may have contributed to Hutchinson's tendency to write counter to intellectual fads while trying to expand his readers' understanding of the possible in the past and present.
At Brown, he won a silver medal in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association championships in 1973 and served as captain and stroke of the men's varsity crew in 1974–5.
During this time, he was President of the Knoxville Rowing Association and played a vital role in establishing the university's first-ever varsity women's crew.
Following a lecture given by Hutchinson at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research in 2021, more than twenty-five years after The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White was initially published, the Afro-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. notably acknowledged the status of Hutchinson's book as "the bible on the Harlem Renaissance".
Since 2013, Hutchinson has researched and taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture at Cornell University, focusing particularly on critical questions around race and ecology.
He is currently working on ecologies of literary emergence in American literature, a well-digger's memoir set in the village of Zéguedéguin, Burkina Faso, and a biography of Jean Toomer.
His edition of Jean Toomer's Cane (novel), published by Penguin Classics in 2019, was an Editors' Choice of the New York Times Book Review.