Professor 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), and a Special Issue of the Lessing Yearbook, co-edited with Michael Olson, "Reading Forster, Reading Race: Philosophy, Politics, and Natural History in the German Enlightenment" (Wallstein, 2025).

Currently she is finalising work on an anthology of primary sources, co-edited with Michael Olson, Key Texts in the History and Philosophy of the German Life Sciences, 1745-1845: Generation, Heredity, Race (Bloomsbury, 2027), and finishing a book on Kant and Forster that is under contract for the Cambridge Elements series (Cambridge, 2028). Her 2026 sabbatical project aims to produce a series of articles investigating the German philosophical reception history of the American Revolution in order to reconstruct the role played by Kant and others in the structural transformation of the late eighteenth century public sphere.

Before moving to Western Sydney University in 2015, Jennifer Mensch spent ten years at the Pennsylvania State University where she taught philosophy and the history of science and medicine.