Janet McIntosh

Janet McIntosh, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist whose work in Kenya and the USA has explored essentialism, personhood, religion, colonialism and race, right-wing ideologies, and militarization. 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 co-editor, with Norma Mendoza-Denton, of Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Her most recent book is Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025).