DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Jacob Henry Leveton is an art historian of the long eighteenth century, with particular expertise in William Blake and Romanticism.

His research examines how relations among visual, literary, and musical forms make collective futures imaginable.

His first book, Zachary Cahill’s Composite Art: A Study of the Poetic Illuminations, is under contract with Mousse and offers the first sustained study of the artist and author Zachary Cahill.

Drawing on paintings, sculptures, installations, artist’s books, performances, and studio process, the book follows Cahill’s USSA, a speculative “Republic of Vision” that recasts traditions of political image-making around participation and belonging, and Unicorn Death Moon, a lyric, sonic, and sculptural project that reanimates classical epic and medieval illumination.

Together, they reconfigure relations among image, text, music, and belief.

Situating these projects within histories extending from William Blake’s illuminated books and the sister arts through revolutionary montage, 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 grounded in reciprocity, mutuality, and belonging.

The book reframes a longstanding art-historical problem—the relations among the arts—through questions of perception, political imagination, and collective life. From the USSA’s speculative republic to Unicorn Death Moon’s forms of mourning and hope, it asks how composite art can give form to political and ecological futures.

Leveton’s current research extends these questions through ecological perception and multisensory form. His second book manuscript, Sites/Sights of Ecology: Image, Music, Text, examines how aesthetic forms register ecological relations across visual art, literature, music, and film. A related chapter in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Romantic Literature and Culture develops “grammaphontology,” a method of listening across languages, media, and cosmologies that attends to difference without reducing it to equivalence.

Leveton’s teaching centers on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art history and visual culture, with particular emphasis on how visual forms shape knowledge, political possibility, and ecological relations under empire.

His Experimental Humanities pedagogy treats interpretation as a form of making grounded in art-historical evidence. Students begin with close looking, object-driven study, material analysis, archival research, and historical context, then test their interpretations through acts of speculative reconstruction—translating historical problems into new visual, fictive, spatial, or performative forms.

These experiments ask students not simply what artworks represent, but how forms organize attention, authority, and the terms of living together, before returning them to the historical object with sharper questions and more perceptive interpretations.

Leveton’s teaching has spanned Art History, English, Classics, and Critical Social Thought at Loyola University Chicago and Mount Holyoke College, and he was Senior Global Futures Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and program coordinator of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University, 2021–24.

His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chicago Objects Study Initiative, the Yale Center for British Art, the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, and the Northwestern Paris Program in Critical Theory. His editorial work includes the non-standard, a weekly paper that brings scholars, writers, and artists together around experimental criticism and the politics of the present.

Selected Publications

Jacob Henry Leveton. Zachary Cahill’s Composite Art: A Study of the Poetic Illuminations. Milan: Mousse Publications. Under contract.

“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 Arif Camoglu, Omar F. Miranda, Gaura Narayan, and Kate Singer, 357–379. London: Bloomsbury Academic (forthcoming, December 2026).

“Experimental, Not ‘Public,’ Humanities,” the non-standard, vol. 1, no. 8 (September 28, 2025): 1–2 [three-column essay].

Kate Singer, Jacob Henry Leveton, and Kate Turner. “Alternate Endings: Romanticism, Anthropocenes, Object Study, and Activist Art Futures.” Essays in Romanticism 32, no. 1 (2025): 30–68.

“‘Of Combustion, blast, vapour, and cloud’: William Blake’s Urizen as Steam Engine, Albion Mill, & Notes Towards a Materialist Method for the Anthropocene.” Essays in Romanticism 29, no. 2 (2022): 131–154.

“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 42, no. 5 (2021): 537–552.

“William Blake’s Enoch Lithograph: Producing the Theme of Self-Annihilation, Resisting the Politics of the Napoleonic Wars.” Essays in Romanticism 24, no. 2 (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/Block Museum of Art, 2017.