Humanities Institute > Jane Bennett
Jane Bennett

Jane Bennett

Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Humanities, Departments of Political Science and Comparative Thought and Literature

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Research Interests: Political theory, American political thought, ecophilosophy

Education: PhD, University of Massachusetts

Jane Bennett is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and she specializes in the environmental humanities, political philosophy, nature-writing, American romanticism, political rhetorics and affects, and contemporary social thought. She has a double appointment in the Departments of Political Science (political theory) and Comparative Thought and Literature.

Bennett is the author of Influx & Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman (2020); Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010, translated into 13 languages); The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); Thoreau's Nature (1994), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment, (1987). She is one of the founders of the journal Theory & Event, and former Editor of the flagship journal Political Theory. 

She is currently working on notions of a creative cosmos, in ancient Greek thought and in classical Daoist philosophies. Her work was profiled in The New Yorker (“The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things,” by Morgan Mies, February 28, 2023). 

Bennett is an Affiliate Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen; and was Visiting Professor at Oxford University (Keble College), Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (University of London); the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University; and Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany. 

She has supervised dissertations on a variety of topics, including ecological philosophy and poetics, political thought, materialisms, affective politics, democratic theory, egalitarianism, nonhuman agency, and power and media.