Jean-Louis Hippolyte holds a M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado. His area of specialization is is 20th-century French literature.

In addition to this, he has worked extensively on French literature in all centuries since the Middle Ages. His teaching interests include French language and culture, contemporary literature and criticism; French cinema; the intersection of discourses in the humanities and the sciences, notably chaos theory and fuzzy logic; the fantastic and magical realism; popular culture and literature; the writing of otherness as well as the emergence of minor literatures in France and in the Francophone world, and their relation to the canon.

His book on contemporary French literature entitled Fuzzy Fiction (University of Nebraska Press) was published in December 2006 and Septième Art (a textbook on French cinema co-authored by David Aldstadt) was published in January 2007 by Heinle. Fuzzy Fiction has been nominated for the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies sponsored by the Association for French Cultural Studies (AFCS) and for the Aldo & Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Literary Studies sponsored by the Modern Language Association (MLA). Fuzzy Fiction has also been published on paperback and is available in electronic format (ebook) on the Barnes&Noble website.

He is the organizer of Philadelphia’s largest French culture and conversation group (French Café).