My research investigates how contemporary conditions—from pandemic isolation to artificial intelligence—are generating new forms of temporal experience and collective affect that exceed traditional theoretical frameworks. Rather than viewing these transformations as deficits or failures, I examine how they open possibilities for novel forms of community and political imagination. Working at the intersection of Aesthetics, Continental Philosophy, and Critical Phenomenology, I develop theoretical resources for understanding emerging forms of collective memory, imagination, and affect.
In my dissertation, “To Write the Body: Lost Time and the Work of Melancholy,” I worked across Continental traditions, and drew resources from literature and psychology to develop a concept of melancholy as an active affect with liberatory potential, highlighting its non-linear temporal structure alongside its aesthetic, social, and political dimensions. In melancholy, I find a liminal way of being and dwelling in-between—self and others, past and present, life and death, real and imaginary—and an attentiveness to the present as a palimpsest of diverse and unassimilable temporalities.
Representative Publications
Toward a phenomenology of “the other world”: This world as it is for no one in particular. Research in phenomenology (2022)
Merleau-Ponty’s melancholy: Phantom limbs and the work of involuntary memory. Epoché: Journal for the history of philosophy (2019)
On the historico-poetic materialism of Benjamin and Celan, Critical horizons: Journal of philosophy and social theory (2018)
Works in progress
Melancholy is a Commonplace (book project)
This book examines how “pandemic melancholy” has emerged as a commonplace affect for subjects lacking the requisite time and community to mourn their losses. Through analyses of Deligny, Barthes, Glissant, and Lugones, I show how collective melancholy becomes a “common-place” for imagining new forms of solidarity. This work develops a framework for understanding how apparent “failures” of traditional temporal experience can indicate emergent forms of collective affect and memory.
Untimely Images: AI, Hallucination, and the Politics of Aesthetic Experience (book project).
I examine how machine hallucination and human affect create new forms of temporal experience that can either perpetuate historical exclusions or enable novel forms of collective recognition and political imagination. This work brings diverse theoretical perspectives, including critical theory, decolonial, and feminist aesthetics, into dialogue with contemporary AI art practices, offering new frameworks for understanding how AI-generated imagery’s temporal indeterminacy can either reinforce reactionary nostalgia or enable new forms of political imagination.
“Lugones’s ‘Loving Playfulness’: Perceiving Difference, Remembering Multiplicity“ (article under review)
I explore María Lugones’s decolonial imaginary through the lens of melancholy, examining its as a kind of time-lag and rupturing space between colonial and postcolonial periods. While Lugones frames decolonial feminism as resistance to the modern/colonial world-system, I focus on its aesthetic dimension of decolonial feminism—specifically how the sensibility of “loving perception” affirms difference and plurality. I extend her notion of “loving playfulness” to memory and futurity, arguing that this critical-phenomenological attitude toward the fractured present enables recognition of plural beings and participates in the decolonization of time.
“Do AI Images Have a Punctum? Phenomenology and the Machinic Imaginary” (article in progress)
I examine how diffusion-based generative models transform our experience of temporal reality. While these images lack photography’s classical punctum—the wound inflicted by an image’s indexical relationship to time—they generate what I call a “wound without event,” creating affective responses to moments that lack their own temporal anchoring. Through analysis of both AI systems’ technical architecture and their phenomenological effects, I demonstrate how these images manifest a “past that has never been present,” creating a spectral temporality that has profound implications for collective memory and political imagination.
“Untimely Configurations in Barthes’s Late Writings” (article in progress)
Through Roland Barthes’s late writings, I examine how melancholy and re-reading function as productive anachronisms. Analyzing Barthes’s engagement with Francois Chateaubriand and his own experience of loss, I explore how re-reading disrupts linear time through what Barthes calls the “middle” of life—decisive moments that divide experience into Before and After. Drawing on Freud’s theory of melancholy, I argue that this temporal suspension creates possibilities for solidarity through literature, where readers discover their experiences reflected and transformed in others’ texts.
Shannon A Hayes 