Jeremy Biles

Over the past several years, Jeremy Biles, trained as a scholar of religion, has mostly undertaken experimental projects across a variety of mediums, operating both within and beyond academic modes and platforms as he attempts to develop a form of “anal surrealism” and an attendant “erotics of everyday life” that includes practices of writing, drawing, alley-walking, and bodybuilding.

Biles (PhD, University of Chicago) is a Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at SAIC, where he teaches courses that engage religion, philosophy, and art, usually with a focus on surrealism. He is the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form; co-editor of Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion; co-author of The Abyss, or Life Is Simple; co-editor of Noli Me Tangere; an editor at the Religious Studies Review, where he also recently guest edited two special issues (one on Georges Bataille, the other on surrealism); co-organizer of a multi-year project in collaboration with Indiana University’s Center for Religion and the Human under the title Operations of the Sun; and a founding member of the International Congress for Infrathin Studies, a group dedicated to experimental investigations into the relations between surrealism and religion. He recently contributed a text to a volume published alongside a new translation of André Breton’s Magic Art from Fulgur Press. Biles’s drawings and assemblages have been exhibited in galleries in and beyond Chicago, while his recent curatorial work includes a pair of exhibitions at Indiana University. His erotic writings have appeared under various pseudonyms, most recently in the inaugural issue of Veilance.