Janet McIntosh
Anthropologist
Janet McIntosh is a Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University whose work bridges cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropology. Her research examines power, language, identity, and belonging across diverse contexts, including East Africa, South Africa, and the United States. Educated at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Michigan, she is the author of several award-winning books, including The Edge of Islam (2009), which explores religion, language, and ethnic hierarchies on the Kenya coast, and Unsettled (2016), an ethnography of white Kenyan communities grappling with the legacies of colonialism. More recently, her scholarship has focused on language, militarism, and right-wing politics in the United States, resulting in publications such as Language in the Trump Era (2020) and Kill Talk (2025), which examines the linguistic dimensions of military violence. Her research has been supported by major fellowships and grants from organizations including Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
McIntosh’s work has explored the way language and non-linguistic signs shape religious experience, ethnicity and race, colonialism, political conservatism, militarism, and other forms of violence. Her most recent work examines the practice of writing inscriptions on munitions like the one pictured below.
Tweet from now-suspended X account, @ZShakerCentral, known for posting pro-Putin war content. This shell inscription was commissioned by an American over social media.
Professor McIntosh has conducted research on military language and its role in steering feeling, thinking, and action towards aggression. Her work among veterans (including Eli Wright, a former Army medic who created the image below) has also celebrated their ingenious ways of using writing and art to address their trauma and moral injury. She has additionally written about the political right in the USA.
Original Artwork by Eli Wright depicting Leonardo Davinci’s Vitruvian Man as a shooting target
McIntosh has written about ethnic hierarchies between Swahili and Giriama on the coast of Kenya, as well as the lives and dilemmas of former colonial settlers and their descendants. Tom Cholmondeley (below), whom she interviewed in prison, was a key respondent in her exploration of white identity and racial hierarchies.
Thomas Cholmondeley, a white Kenyan aristocrat convicted of killing a Black Kenyan who was hunting game on his property. Image via Antony Njuguna (Reuters)
Themes of religion and ritual, belief and practice, have been central to Professor McIntosh’s work since the publication of her first book, which explores differing models of personhood and how they shape the way people understand and practice Islam. She has also written about plural religious ontologies, spirit possession, white Kenyans’ complex relationship to the African occult, ritual practice, and oracular and magical thinking in the West.
A Giriama healer named Karissa holds up gourds of herbal medicine in a shrine. Photo by Janet McIntosh.