ANDREW 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.
Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Established in 1973 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Held by Jane Bennett
JANE BENNETT, Ph.D., is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is one of the founders of the journal Theory & Event and edited the journal Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy from 2012-17.
Professor Bennett specializes in political theory: ecological philosophy, art and politics, American political thought, political rhetoric and persuasion, and contemporary social theory. She has been a Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg fur Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany; at Oxford University (Keble College), at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (University of London), and the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University. She was a seminar director at the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell in 2013. Her latest book is Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Duke University Press, 2020).