Isaac Jean-François

Isaac Jean-François received their PhD in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University in 2026. Their research explores embodied Black queer aesthetics across the study of art, music, and sensory experience, with particular attention to experimental composition, visual culture, and psychoanalysis.

Their scholarship has appeared in Current Musicology, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and, co-authored with Jessie Cox, liquid blackness. In 2025, Jean-François curated a concert titled Speculative Listening: The Sonic World of Julius Eastman for BlackBox Ensemble, presented at Bang on a Can Long Play Festival and The Whitney Museum in New York City.

Building on a seminar they co-taught on bodies, sensations, and the aesthetics of difference at Yale University, Jean-François and medieval art historian Jacqueline Jung are co-authoring Transcendent: The Body in Medieval and Modern Black Art (forthcoming, MIT Press).

They hold a BA from Columbia University, a Certificate of Study from The European Graduate School, and have completed the Scholar’s Program at The Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Excitable Blackness is a study of racialization’s sensory life, foregrounding sound, smell, and vision as sites where aesthetic intensity coincides with forms of self-effacement and abjection. The project explores how black gay men dissolve their bodies in experimental music, personal writing, and visual art while provoking interpreters to reassess their own relationship to embodiment and desire. With Julius Eastman’s ecstatic musical compositions, Gary Fisher’s erotic journals, and Richmond Barthé’s sensual nude sculptures, Jean-François traces a sensory grammar of bodily dissolution that upsets form and inspires movement to other modes of relation. What makes avant-garde musical, poetic, and sculptural compositions and practices that transcend social categorization, black and gay?

What does the frenzied attempt to recover black gay men from archival fragments reveal about our present? Eastman’s graphic musical scores invite a promiscuous listening; a method that moves from medieval chant to disco, treating his expansive repertoire as dissociative listening. Fisher’s journals capture his desire to become a slave and treat the skin as a place where memory, trauma, and desire take shape. Barthé’s figures eroticize classical form to stage a black erotic presence within the sacred and sublime. Bridging Black Studies, psychoanalysis, and aesthetic theory, and moving across the medieval to the modern, this project insists the racialized body is not merely represented by black artists but animated in its ongoing reduction and abstraction