Jennifer Mensch

Jennifer Mensch is a Kant specialist and intellectual historian whose research lies at the intersection of philosophy, science, and politics during the long eighteenth century. In addition to numerous essays on Kant and his contemporaries, she has published a monograph, Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2013, 2015 pbk, 2019 reprint), an edited collection, Kant and the Feeling of Life: Beauty and Nature in the Critique of Judgment (SUNY Press, 2024, 2025 pbk), a co-edited Special Issue of the Lessing Yearbook, “Reading Forster, Reading Race: Philosophy, Politics, and Natural History in the German Enlightenment” (Wallstein, 2025), and is finalising work on a co-edited anthology of primary sources, Key Texts in the History and Philosophy of the German Life Sciences, 1745-1845: Generation, Heredity, Race (Bloomsbury, 2027). Her current research includes attention to 18th-century German philosophical reception histories of travel narratives, with a special focus on the role played by Georg Forster.