Jean-François Vernay was the founding editor of Correspondances Oceaniennes, a half-yearly Noumea-based cultural journal. He has published articles and reviews of Australian literature in French and English.

One of Vernay's special research interests is the writing of Christopher Koch (q.v.), the subject of Vernay's PhD dissertation. In 2009, Vernay received an Excellence Award from the THESE PAC jury (le prix THESE-PAC, Prix Jean-Pierre Piérard) in the South Pacific-Australasia category for his PhD on Koch.

In 2016, Vernay published The Seduction of Fiction: A Plea for Putting Emotions Back into Literary Interpretation (Palgrave, 2016). In 2019, he released the sequel, La Séduction de la fiction (Hermann, 2019). In 2022, he successfully defended his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches), accreditation to supervise research, France's highest academic qualification, with a dissertation titled 'Vers une traduction des mécanismes cognitifs et affectifs en contexte postcolonial: le cas de l’Australie. Towards a translation of affective and cognitive processses in postcolonial context: The case of Australia'.