Jacob Henry Leveton is a scholar of Romanticism and Post-Romanticism, and a theorist of visual culture, poetics and music, working especially on the uses of images in relation to critical sustainability issues. Broadly, Dr. Leveton's research addresses the problem of “seeing ecology,” the process by which environmental relations enter into the social field of visual experience.
At the Humanities Institute, Dr. Leveton produces vital humanities programming exploring a diverse range of philosophical concepts, historical archives, indigenous knowledges and critical geographies in concert with the arts and the physical, biological and planetary sciences at ASU. Dr. Leveton is committed to developing the experimental humanities as a capacious field that assists in building just, sustainable and inclusive democratic futures.
Dr. Leveton is currently completing their book manuscript, "Sites/Sights of Ecology." The project engages how energy-intensive sites of environmental transformation condition affective sights of artistic production, crossing poetics, image practices and music composition.
Chapters of the book study how the visual artist and poet William Blake's illuminated books alongside the London symphonies of the composer Joseph Haydn responded to the emergence of Albion Mill in South London, the first site where multiple coal-driven steam engines were employed in a single process of mass manufacture. With Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey" as a critical heuristic and means of fostering analytic leaps towards considerations of the future, the book continues with a chapter on glossolalia, post-tonalism and sonic visuality in the work of the contemporary Icelandic musical artist Sigur Rós and concludes with a chapter on the Diné poet-librettist Laura Tohe's opera “Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio."
Dr. Leveton’s research has been supported by the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, the Myers Foundations, Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale Center for British Art.