Professor Bennett specializes in the environmental humanities, political philosophy, nature-writing, American romanticism, political rhetoric and persuasion, and contemporary social thought. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen, at Oxford University (Keble College), at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (University of London), at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University, at Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany. She edited the journal Political Theory, was a seminar director at the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell in 2013, and was a founding editor of Theory & Event.  She is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); Vibrant Matter (2010 and translated into eleven languages); Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (2020).

Her recent essays have appeared in Grain/Vapor/Ray (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2014), A Feeling for Things: Conversations On and Around the Work of Jane Bennett (eds. Baraitser ad O'Rourke, Punctum Press, 2015), Evental Aesthetics (special issue on Vital Materialism), and The Nonhuman Turn (ed. Grusin, Minnesota Press 2015). She is the author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010); The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton 2001); Thoreau's Nature (Rowman Littlefield, 1994), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment, (NYU 1987).  

She is currently working on a study of Walt Whitman and the political implications of his invocation of a network of personal, natural, and cosmic “sympathies."