Scholarship and Biography
Janet McIntosh, Professor of Anthropology, is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on linguistic anthropology, psychological anthropology, language ideology, narrative and discourse, personhood, essentialism, militarization and demilitarization, religion, ritual, Islam, ethnic identity, colonialism and postcoloniality, and whiteness studies, based on fieldwork in East Africa and the USA. After earning a BA at Harvard University (summa cum laude) and, funded by a Marshall Scholarship, a second BA at Oxford University (first class honors), she undertook graduate training at the University of Michigan, earning her Ph.D in 2002 and winning a Distinguished Dissertation Award. Her first book, "The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast" (Duke University Press, 2009), won the 2010 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion. Her second book, "Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans" (University of California Press, 2016), received Honorable Mention in the 2018 American Ethnological Society's Senior Book Prize, and Honorable Mention in the 2017 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. She is the author of "Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics" (Oxford University Press 2025) and co-editor, with Norma Mendoza-Denton, of "Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies" (Cambridge University Press 2020). Her work has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the ACLS, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. McIntosh has published in such journals as American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology Today, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Africa, Journal of Religion in Africa, Signs and Society, Language in Society, Annual Review of Anthropology, and Language and Communication. She has served on the Editorial Boards of Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language (Oxford University Press), the journal Cultural Anthropology, the journal Anthropology and Humanism, and the Journal of Religion in Africa. The courses she teaches at Brandeis include "Contemporary Anthropological Theory" (graduate level), "Language in American Life," "Linguistic Anthropology," "Psychological Anthropology," "Colonialism and Postcoloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Encounters and Dilemmas," "Communication and Media," "Introduction to the Comparative Study of Human Societies," "Linguistic Anthropology for Ethnographers," and "Anthropology of Military and Policing." Before coming to Brandeis she taught at University of Michigan, Harvard University, and MIT.