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Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities

Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

Established in 1973 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

MellonAndrewANDREW W. MELLON, born in 1855, was a financier, diplomat, and industrialist. Mr. Mellon helped found the Union Trust Company of Pittsburgh, the Gulf Oil Corporation, and the Pittsburgh Coal Company. In 1921, he left the presidency of the Mellon National Bank to become U.S. secretary of the treasury, serving for ten years under presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. He later served as ambassador to Great Britain during 1932-33. Upon his death in 1937, Mr. Mellon left his vast collection of art to create the National Gallery of Art and enough funds for the construction of the building on the Washington, D.C., mall. Four chairs at Hopkins are named for Andrew W. Mellon, two at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, one at the Peabody Conservatory, and one at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

Held by Jane Bennett

Professor JANE BENNETT specializes in the environmental humanities, political philosophy, nature-writing, American romanticism, and contemporary social thought. She is a Faculty Affiliate at the University of Copenhagen, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University (Keble College), at Bauhaus-Weimar University, at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (University of London), at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University. She edited the journal Political Theory, was a seminar director at the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell, and was a founding editor of Theory & Event. She is the author of Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment (1986); Thoreau’s Nature (1993); The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); Vibrant Matter (2010, translated into eleven languages); and Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (2020).