Jess Wright

she/they

writer - historian - teacher

Bio

I am a writer, historian, and teacher living in West Yorkshire. My work has appeared in literary and academic journals, in anthologies and edited volumes, and in zines. I have written two books: The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2022) and Psychiatry: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2025). I hold degrees in Classics from Cambridge and Princeton, and I'm an alum of the Tin House Summer Workshop. For the past ten years, I have taught in community settings, prisons, and universities. At present, I teach in the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Leeds and run writing workshops in the local community.

Writing: Selected Publications

2025
Psychiatry: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic) (non-fiction)2024
Weightless - t'ART Magazine 7 (flash fiction)
Kitchen Table - Shared Stories, Connecting Lives (flash fiction)
My girlfriend crawls inside the fruitcage - Paragraph Planet (Feb 2, 2024) (micro fiction)
second anniversary - republication in Sea Change, Red Moon Press (concrete poem)2023
Unpacking the hermit crab essay - Write or Die (craft essay)
Hibiscus - Queerlings 7 (flash prose)
so to speak - streetcake magazine 86 (cut-up poem)
second anniversary - Whiptail Journal 7 (concrete poem)
Review of Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome by Sandra Boehringer - Bryn Mawr Classical Review (academic book review)
Lips - t'ART Magazine 5 (free verse)2022
The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity - University of California Press (academic monograph)
Rethinking catharsis: gender, mental disorder, and emotions - The Rootcutter (essay on history of medicine)
A visit to my ex-wife and her new girlfriend - Microfiction Monday - 200th edition (micro fiction)
A pair of shoes - Shirley Magazine 22 (experimental fiction)
They call it clay, we call it meat - Thanatos Review 1 (flash essay)
Yellowhammer - Whiptail Journal 2 (sequence of one-line poems)
Retranslations - Tiny Spoon 9: Cut / Copy / Paste : The Remix (erasure poems)
On sponges - Foglifter Journal 7 (lyric essay)
Y is for Yellowhammer - Mslexia 93 (flash memoir)
On what is in our power - Michigan Quarterly Review 61.1 (braided essay)2021 and earlier
A still unknown city - clavmag 7 (memoir)
Commentary on personal ads - Sapphic Writers Collective: Closeness (hermit crab essay)
Crazy talk: the dangerous rhetoric of mental illness - Eidolon (essay)
Latin behind bars: teaching college Latin in an American prison - Eidolon (essay)
Pindar's Eleventh Pythian Ode - Tellus 6 (version of an ancient Greek poem)
Flight - L + S Press (poem - broadside)
Hare, breathing - Third Annual James Kirkup Memorial Poetry Anthology (free verse, runner up)
Private correspondence - The Prose-Poem Project 2.4 (prose poem)
Schwanenlied - Prole (free verse)
After the fact - Lines + Stars (free verse)

Research

I hold a PhD in Classics and a graduate certificate in History of Science from Princeton University, where I was supervised by Brooke Holmes. My doctoral dissertation, Brain and Soul in Late Antiquity, became the basis for my first book, The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2022). My second book, Psychiatry: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2025), examines the connections between the modern psy- disciplines and ancient Greece.I have published academic journal articles, book chapters in edited volumes, book reviews, and blog posts. I've delivered invited lectures, workshops, and conference papers at the Society for Classical Studies, the North American Patristics Society, the History of Science Society, the British Society for the History of Science, and other conferences. I was a co-founding editor of The Rootcutter (a blog attached to the Society for Ancient Medicine) and a junior board member of ReMeDHe. My academic writing has won the following prizes: Peter R. Brown Prize; John J. Winkler Memorial Prize; North American Patristics Society Graduate Student Paper Prize.My research has been supported by grants from Princeton University (Center for Culture, Religion, and Society), the University of Southern California, and the North American Patristics Society. My second book was supported by a grant from the Society of Authors.In 2021, I left my position as Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and returned to the UK, where I began a shift from a research-focused writing output to creative and experimental work. During 2024-2024, I was a member of Writing the Now, a collective of experimental academic writers at the University of Leeds. As part of my current work teaching academic skills in the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Leeds, I have begun to undertake practitioner research into experiences of academic writing among neurodivergent, mature students.

The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2022)

“Surpassingly well-researched and beautifully written, The Care of the Brain uncovers surprising new facets of ancient Christian thought. Jessica Wright argues persuasively that the brain—unmentioned in the New Testament—was nevertheless a necessary concept for the development of early Christian culture, especially ascetic practice.”Ellen Muehlberger, author of Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death in Late Ancient Christianity

Reviews of The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity:“[I]t is a well-researched and beautifully written study of the concept of the brain as a powerful and multi-functional tool, focusing on Christian authors’ explorations of self-governance, salvation, and human identity.”
Kyriakoula Tzorzopoulou, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review"The book is a dazzling achievement. Not only does it trouble the distinction between the 'rationalism' of Greece and Rome and the 'religion' of Christianity, but also it challenges current ideas about neuroscience as the authority of personhood."
Anne Kreps, in Reading Religion"This is a valuable study, carefully and comprehensively researched, beautifully written and well produced, of importance to many fields including the history of science, psychology, western culture and Christianity. It deserves a wide readership."
Monica Tobon, in The Classical Review"W. has done an excellent job of expanding and assembling this rich material into a coherent and enlightening narrative that will appeal to all scholars with an interest in ancient medicine. I was particularly impressed by W.'s commitment to dismantling once and for all the still-lingering image of Late Antiquity as a decadent period of calcified ideas. Her detailed research reveals a complex intellectual environment, agile and malleable like the brain."
Giacomo Savani, in The Journal of Roman Studies

Psychiatry: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)

Is psychiatry a distinctively modern approach to mental difference and distress, or is it a continuation of ancient Greek ideas – in the realm not only of medicine (consider 'melancholia'), but also of philosophy (source of the idea of 'therapeutics of the soul') and tragic drama (inspiration for, among other concepts, the 'Oedipus complex')? This volume examines how psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have been shaped by classical antiquity (and ideas about antiquity), and it explores the stories told about what this relationship between the psy disciplines and ancient Greece might mean.Taking as a starting point the debate about what exactly mental illnesses might be, Psychiatry: Antiquity and Its Legacy explores how contemporary tensions and debates reflect efforts to smooth over inconsistencies and discontinuities between ancient and modern ideas about illnesses affecting the mind. The volume goes on to investigate key concepts that bridge classical antiquity and modern psychiatry, showing how these ideas have been adapted and repurposed for new circumstances, analysing how they are deployed to negotiate the legitimacy of current theories, and demonstrating how the roles they play in psychiatry reshape our understandings of antiquity itself. What emerges above all is how the process of examining the connections between modern psychiatry and classical antiquity, whether historical, constructed or imagined, can illuminate modern ideas about mental illness, approaches to treating it, and its place in contemporary society and culture.

For a list of my shorter academic publications, please see my Academia.edu page.

Workshops

I have run community-based creative writing workshops since 2019. Topics have included: generative practice, erasure poetry, cut-ups, micro prose, nature writing, world-building, tarot for writers, hermit crab essays, and zine-making.
If you're interested in organising a workshop, please get in touch with a brief description of what you are interested in and the intended audience.At the heart of my facilitation practice is a commitment to creativity as a practice of connection, grounding, and transformation. My work is informed by workshops through the Teaching Artist Project, as well as by my training with the Metanoia Institute, where I obtained a Certificate in Therapeutic Counselling Skills and Studies in 2021, and the Leeds Permaculture Network, where I gained my Permaculture Design Certificate in 2024.During 2024, I ran a monthly generative writing lab at The Bookish Type in Leeds, alongside occasional one-off workshops. Prior to this, I facilitated workshops for Gemini Ink, Arts & Minds, Leeds Poetry Festival, Leeds2023, the Leeds LGBTQ+ Community Consortium, and Writing the Now.

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