Jacob Henry Leveton, Ph.D.
Adjunct Instructor
Jacob Henry Leveton works in Art History, Visual Culture, and the Jesuit Experimental Humanities.
His scholarship moves between British Atlantic visual culture of the long eighteenth century and modern and contemporary art and media, especially work that crosses image, text, sound, film, and performance. With particular specialization in William Blake and Romanticism, he studies how these forms shape scientific knowledge, political power, empire, ecological relation, and spiritual imagination across historical periods.
In his first book, Zachary Cahill’s Composite Art: A Study of the Poetic Illuminations (forthcoming, Mousse), Leveton offers the first sustained study of the Chicago-based artist and author Zachary Cahill’s visual, literary, sonic, and devotional work. Across Cahill’s paintings, sculptures, installations, artist’s books, performances, and studio process, he traces the USSA, a speculative republic of vision, and Unicorn Death Moon, an illuminated, lyric, sonic, and sculptural project reworking postmedieval forms of image, text, music, and belief. Situating both within lineages from William Blake’s illuminated books and the sister arts to revolutionary montage and contemporary book arts, Leveton argues that Cahill develops a “composite art” in which distinct media remain in productive tension, continually remaking one another while modeling a politics of relation—one that replaces synthesis and command with reciprocity, participation, and collective belonging. The book reframes a longstanding art-historical problem of relations among the arts through questions of perception, political imagination, and collective life, developing a theory of Experimental Humanities in which creation and criticism become mutually transformative forms of inquiry.
Leveton’s broader scholarship brings environmental humanities into conversation with visual culture, music, and comparative poetics. His second book project, Sites/Sights of Ecology: Image, Music, Text, traces ecological perception from William Blake and Joseph Haydn to Stanley Kubrick, Sigur Rós, and Laura Tohe’s opera Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio. His work on Enemy Slayer extends this inquiry through Diné Bizaad poetics, translation, ceremony, and sonic form, developing “Grammaphontology” as a method for listening across languages, media, and cosmologies. A developing book project on the Athens-based composer and artist Theodore turns this comparative method toward classical and philosophical reception. Centering Theodore’s engagement with Hesiod’s poetics in FIRE (2025), the project examines how breath, repetition, duration, and musical form reconfigure authority and ethical responsibility while tracing the afterlives of ancient Greek myth, ritual, and religious imagination through albums, scores, lyrics, performance histories, and Theodore’s composer archives.
At Loyola University Chicago, Leveton brings these research commitments into his teaching across Art History, Visual Culture, and Classical Studies, including Core and Writing-Intensive courses. His courses combine close looking and object-based analysis with careful listening, slow reading, reflective writing, archival and collection-based research, and creative translation. Across global art history, classical epic and comedy, and contemporary visual culture, students approach images, texts, sounds, and performances as forms that organize memory, power, perception, and ethical judgment.
A signature course in his Loyola teaching is FNAR 199: Art and Visual Culture, a Writing-Intensive Core course in the Jesuit Experimental Humanities grounded in Ignatian practices of attention, reflection, discernment, and return. Leveton teaches art and visual culture by asking how vision is socially constructed: how artworks, media, archives, institutions, histories, and sensory forms shape what, how, and whom we learn to see. Beginning with close description and visual analysis, students move through Examen writing, observation, archival encounter, creative translation, and recursive revision toward independent interpretation and research, learning to understand attention as an ethical practice of noticing and responding.
Organized as a “Library of Sound and Sight,” FNAR 199 places artworks, films, archives, poetry, and critical theory in conversation with music by Hozier, Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Rosalía, Theodore, Max Richter, and others. Listening labs and digital audio exercises treat albums, lyrics, waveforms, and recorded voices as objects of sustained analysis alongside paintings, photographs, and manuscripts. Past guest interlocutors have included W.J.T. Mitchell, Theodore, JaNae Contag, S. Hollis Clayson, and Zachary Cahill. Integrated into the course rather than presented as stand-alone lectures, these encounters let students test questions with theorists, discuss process with artists, and encounter scholarship as a practice of interpretation, revision, and discovery.
Beyond the classroom, Leveton extends this collaborative practice through editorial and public-facing work as founding editor of The Non-Standard, a weekly paper for experimental writing across art, criticism, political theory, poetry, media, and the news cycle. Bringing scholars, artists, critics, and writers into shared inquiry, the publication treats writing, image, typography, and editorial form as modes of thought, developing what it calls “non-journalism”: a practice of writing with the present rather than reporting on it from a distance.
For Leveton, this is the work of the Jesuit Experimental Humanities: bringing experience into reflection, reflection into judgment, and judgment into response, while giving students the confidence to enter intellectual and creative communities as participants rather than spectators.
Leveton received his PhD in Art History from Northwestern University, where he also pursued Critical Theory through the Northwestern Paris Program. A predoctoral Chicago Objects Study Initiative Curatorial Research Fellow in Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, he has since taught at Mount Holyoke College, Loyola University Chicago, and Northwestern University, where he returns in 2026–27 as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History. He previously served as Senior Global Futures Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and program coordinator in the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University. His work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Yale Center for British Art, the Myers Foundations, the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, the Evan Frankel Foundation, and Northwestern University’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Feinberg School of Medicine.
@levetonjacobh (Instagram)
Education
PhD, Art History, Northwestern University
MA, Art History, University of Oregon
BA, English Literature, Arizona State University (Summa Cum Laude)
Specialty Area
British Romanticism & the Long Eighteenth Century; Visual Culture; Environmental & Experimental Humanitiesv
Courses Taught
Art and Visual Culture - FNAR 199
Art History: Renaissance - Modern - FNAR 201
Modern Art - FNAR 202
Publications/Research Listings
Zachary Cahill’s Composite Art: A Study of the Poetic Illuminations. Mousse, forthcoming 2027.
“Grammaphontology and the Grammar of Return: Enemy Slayer, Prometheus Unbound, and the Sonic Redistribution of the Sensible.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Romantic Literature and Culture, edited by Kate Singer et al. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming December 2026.
“On Non-Journalism.” the non-standard, vol. 1, no. 2 (August 10, 2025).
Kate Singer, Jacob Henry Leveton, and Kate Turner. “Alternate Endings: Romanticism, Anthropocenes, Object Study, and Activist Art Futures.” Essays in Romanticism, vol. 32, no. 1 (April 2025): 30–68.
“Plates 3.10–3.11: Lincoln Minster.” In Vetusta Monumenta: Ancient Monuments, edited by Crystal B. Lake and Noah Heringman, vol. 3. London: Society of Antiquaries of London, April 2025.
“Blake’s Gothic Nature as Spiritual Exercise.” VALA, the Journal of the Blake Society, vol. 3 (November 2023): 83 [Multiple Columns].
“‘Of Combustion, blast, vapour, and cloud’: William Blake’s Urizen as Steam Engine, Albion Mill, and Notes Toward a Materialist Method for the Anthropocene.” Essays in Romanticism, vol. 29, no. 2 (October 2022): 131–154.
“Dispatches from the Animal Revolution.” Portable Gray, vol. 5, no. 1 (June 2022): 14–19.
“Seeing Ecology: Pollination and the Resistance to Adam Smith’s Theory of Political Economy in William Blake’s Book of Thel (1789).” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 42, no. 5 (February 2021): 537–552.
“William Blake’s חנוך (‘Enoch’) Lithograph: Producing the Theme of Self-Annihilation, Resisting the Politics of the Napoleonic Wars.” Essays in Romanticism, vol. 24, no. 2 (October 2018): 161–186.
“William Blake and Art Against Surveillance.” In William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, edited by Stephen F. Eisenman, 141–160. Princeton: Princeton University Press/Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 2017.