Joshua Bennett

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of Literature and the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the author of five acclaimed books, including Spoken Word: A Cultural History (2023), The Study of Human Life (2022), and Owed (2020). His work intersects African American literature, environmental studies, poetry and poetics, animality studies, and affect theory, earning recognition through awards like the Guggenheim Fellowship and William Sanders Scarborough Prize.

• Ph.D. in English from Princeton University
• M.A. in Theatre and Performance from University of Warwick (Marshall Scholar)

His research explores the intersections of Blackness, ecology, and nonhuman agency, while his teaching includes courses like Studies in Poetry: Pretending (2024) and Nature Poetry (2023). Bennett also co-founded the Minor Notes series, amplifying marginalized voices in the black expressive tradition.

Selected as a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Whiting Award, he has been honored for his contributions to poetry and criticism through fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His performances at venues like the Sundance Film Festival and the White House underscore his prominence as a public intellectual.