Lacey Jones
I am a theorist of aesthetics and the secular from Romanticism through the present. Professionally trained in both literary and religious studies, I locate my work at their intersection for methodological reasons. Together, the dual instabilities of method (literary studies) and object (religious studies) offer a unique perspective on the ways that these categories shape one another when it comes to the orienting terms that haunt both fields: embodiment, representation, orientation, interpretation, critique, ‘the human.’
My current research traces the long intellectual arc of artistic and conceptual movements—Romanticism, Decadence, Modernism—in which theory is particularly self-conscious of itself as theory. Stretching from Shelley’s Frankenstein to Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, my first book project, Breakdown: Modernity’s Metafictions, examines the longstanding critical promise that reflexivity is reparative. Breakdown is a new intellectual history of the so-called post-critical turn, a movement away from a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and towards what Eve Sedgwick has dubbed “reparative reading.” But while post-critical methodologies operate in the language of affect, identifying repair as a kind of feel-good lens for interpretation, I argue instead that the work of repair is a question not of feeling but of form. Repair and breakdown, my project insists, are two ways of describing the same relationship between representation and reality: metafiction. My second book project, a 21st-century reimagining of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, reads despair as the simultaneity of intimacy and estrangement.
At Yale, I teach courses on melancholy and decay and work as an associate editor for The Yale Review. I am also a faculty affiliate for the Program for the Humanities in Medicine at Yale Medical School. You can find my academic work in Literature & Theology, my fiction in The Kenyon Review, and my poetry in Image.
Selected Publications
“A Forming Poem”: Towards a Process Poetics
Updated August 2025.