Jennifer Clare's research centers around comparative literary theoretical traditions, with an emphasis on South Asian literature and aesthetics. Her work looks at how questions of genre, representation, and the performative power of language have been theorized in premodern South Asian interpretive traditions, particularly those of Tamil-speaking South India. Her current book project focuses specifically on competing literary theoretical paradigms in treatises and commentaries on poetics composed in South India between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries, and the role of the Tamil classical past in these debates.