Meet Janet

Janet McIntosh is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. A cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist, she has studied power dynamics in East Africa, South Africa, and the United States. McIntosh received a BA in anthropology from Harvard University (summa cum laude), then attended the University of Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, where she received a second BA in philosophy and psychology (with first-class honors). With the funding support of a Jacob K. Javitz Fellowship, she earned an MA and PhD in anthropology at the University of Michigan, then taught anthropology and writing classes at Harvard and MIT before arriving at Brandeis.

McIntosh’s award-winning dissertation on ethnic hierarchies, religion, and language in Kenya formed the basis for her first book, The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast (Duke University Press, 2009). She later conducted extensive fieldwork on Kenya’s community of former colonial settlers and their descendants, examining how these white elites navigate their uncertain belonging in an independent nation deeply critical of colonialism. This exploration resulted in her second ethnography, Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans (University of California Press, 2016). Between them, these volumes received three major book prizes in the discipline of anthropology.

McIntosh’s more recent research has focused on the linguistic, psychological, and affective dynamics involved in right-wing politics and militarism in the United States and beyond. With Norma Mendoza-Denton, she co-edited and co-authored Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies (Cambridge University Press, 2020). After extensive fieldwork among US military veterans, she published Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025). Her current scholarship further examines variations on the theme of language and cruelty, including the multinational dynamics of writing slogans and other messages on deadly munitions.

McIntosh’s anthropological scholarship has been funded by Brandeis University, the Fulbright Foundation, the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (two Faculty Fellowships and one summer fellowship for the research and writing of Unsettled and Kill Talk).