From January 2003 to June 2018, Hent de Vries held a joint appointment as Professor in the Humanities Center/Comparative Thought & Literature and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. From October 2007 through June 2018, he held the Russ Family Chair in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, he held the Chair of Metaphysics and Its History in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam (1993-2002), where he remained a Regular Visiting Professor of Systematic Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion until recently. He was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), an interdisciplinary research institute with a graduate program, and served as the Director of its governing board (1994-98) and its Scientific Director (1998-2004).
He received his PhD in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Leiden in 1989. His previous teaching and research positions include: Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of German at Johns Hopkins; Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago; Visiting Professor at the Departments of German and the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins; Senior Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago; Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions and Visiting Scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University; Visiting Scholar at The Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University; Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University.
From September 2012 through January 2013, he was a Visiting Professor in the Council of the Humanities and a Stewart Fellow in the Department of German at Princeton University.
From May 2007 through June 2013, Hent de Vries was Directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, in Paris.
In 2012-2015, he was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Humanities of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, at the invitation of its President, Menachem Ben-Sasson, and its then Rector Magnificus, Sarah Stroumsa. During three years he taught regular intensive, three-week-long seminars in the Department of Comparative Religion as well as under the auspices of the European Forum, which coordinates and initiates matters related to European Studies at the Hebrew University for the Faculties of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Law.
In June and July 2012, Hent de Vries served on the faculty of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, where he offered a six-week seminar on "Miracles, Events, Effects." Later that year he was elected a Member of SCT's Board to be one of the School's Senior Fellows. He was further appointed by the full Board to serve as SCT's Director from June 2014 through August 2018 and then reappointed to serve a second term, through August 2022.
At Johns Hopkins, Hent de Vries served as an affiliated faculty member of The Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Jewish Studies Program in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. He was a member of Member of the Project on Evolution, Cognition, and Culture as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS). He finally served as a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for Advanced Media Studies (CAMS) and of the Dean's Islamic Studies Group and, from its foundation in 2014 until 2018, of the Islamic Studies Program.
From February 2012 through February 2014, he was an invited member of a two-year long seminar, comprised of participants drawn from universities, think tanks, government agencies and media, and sponsored by the newly launched Global Politics and Religion Initiative (GPRI) to promote the study of religion and international affairs at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Since May 2015, he is an Executive Board Member of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP), funded by the Mellon Foundation.
In May 2017, he was Professeur Invité at the Centre de Philosophie Contemporaine de la Sorbonne, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Hent de Vries has been appointed as the 2018 Titulaire de la Chaire de Métaphysique Etienne Gilson at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In that capacity, he will present six public lectures in March 2018, which will be published by the Presses Universitaires de France. The endowed chair and lecture series commemorates the work of the well-known twentieth-century medievalist and Descartes specialist, Etienne Gilson. Earlier chair holders include Pierre Aubenque, Alain de Libera, Jean-Luc Marion, Stanley Rosen, Stéphane Moses, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Francis Jacques, Jean Greisch, Jean Grondin, Rémi Braque, and Cathérine Chalier.
In July 2017, Hent de Vries was appointed as Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities at the School of Arts and Science, New York University, with appointments in Religious Studies, German, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy.
