Janet McIntosh

Janet McIntosh, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist with fieldwork-based expertise in East Africa and the United States. Her research spans personhood, militarization, ethnoreligious boundaries, colonialism, and white nationalism, with a focus on semiotic analysis and language ideology.

• Education: Ph.D. (2002) and M.A. from University of Michigan; B.A. from Harvard (summa cum laude) and University of Oxford (first class honors).

McIntosh examines necropolitical language in the U.S. military and has edited Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies (Cambridge, 2020). Her articles highlight intersections of language, power, and affect in contexts from neoliberal Indonesia to alt-right movements.

Recent publications (2021-2025) include analyses of:

• Military necropolitics and dehumanizing epithets
• Alt-right semiotics in "Let's Go Brandon" and QAnon
• Essentialism and the "Manosphere"
• Trump-era linguistic emergencies
• Neoliberal moral discourse in Indonesia

She has received numerous accolades including the Clifford Geertz Prize, NEH and ACLS Fellowships, and multiple teaching awards. Her work appears in leading journals such as American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Signs and Society.