The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute

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.

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. 

Interviews with her include: “Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter,” interview with Mauro Garofolo in Il sole 24 ore; "Afterword: Conversations with Jane Bennett," with Andreas Bandak and Daniel M. Knight, in Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres, eds. Bandak and Knight; "(Why) Lucretius Matters: An Interview with Jane Bennett," K: Revue trans-européenne de philosophie et arts, numéro 6, 1/2021; "Interview with Jane Bennett," LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape  Architecture (University of Pennsylvania School of Design, published by ORO Editions, San Francisco, CA), Issue 11, "Vitality," spring 2020; "Eco-sensibilities:  Interview with Jane Bennett," Janell Watson, Minnesota Review, 81, Oct 2013; "Agency, Nature and Emergent Properties: An Interview with Jane Bennett" with Gulshan Khan, Contemporary Political Theory 8.1, February 2009; "Vibrant Matter - Zero Landscape: Interview with Jane Bennett," with Klaus Leonhart, Graz ArchitekturMagazin, GAM 07. Unfolding Active Agencies of Landscape, April 2011.