---
title: "Jennifer Michael Hecht"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Michael_Hecht"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:39:21.684457+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Jennifer Michael Hecht (born November 23, 1965) is a teacher, author, poet, historian, and philosopher. She was an associate professor of history at Nassau Community College (1994–2007) and most recently taught at The New School in New York City.
Hecht has seven published books, her scholarly articles have been published in many journals and magazines, and her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ms. Magazine, and Poetry Magazine, among others. She has also written essays and book reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The American Scholar, The Boston Globe and other publications. She has written several columns for The New York Times online "Times Select." In 2010 Hecht was one of the five nonfiction judges for the National Book Award.
Hecht is a longtime blogger for The Best American Poetry series web site and maintains a personal blog on her website. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.

== Background ==
Born in Glen Cove, New York on Long Island, Hecht attended Adelphi University, where she earned a BA in history, for a time studying at the Université de Caen, and the Université d'Angers. She earned her PhD in the history of science from Columbia University in 1995 and taught at Nassau Community College from 1994 to 2007, finally as a tenured associate professor of history. Hecht has taught in the MFA programs at The New School and Columbia University, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Hecht is married and has two children.
She has appeared on television on the Discovery Channel, The Morning Show with Marcus Smith, Road to Reason and MSNBC's Hardball, and on radio on The Brian Lehrer Show, The Leonard Lopate Show, On Being (formerly known as Speaking of Faith), All Things Considered, The Joy Cardin Show, and others.

== Intellectual interests and writings ==
Of her three major intellectual interests, she ranks them, "Poetry came first, then historical scholarship, then public atheism, and they probably remain in that order in my dedication to them."
Originally intending to be a poet, she was drawn to the history of science. Her first book, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France, 1876-1936, grew out of her dissertation on some late 19th-century anthropologists who formed the Society of Mutual Autopsy. The members would dissect each other's brains after death, and Hecht, having noticed their atheism, came to understand that this was being done not only for the sake of scientific finds, but perhaps to prove to the Catholic Church that the soul does not exist.
While researching her first book, she came to realize that there was no sufficient history of atheism, and that led to her second book, Doubt: A History.
While writing Doubt, she found that many atheists went beyond simply stating that there are no gods and also made profound suggestions about how people should think of life and how we should live. That led to her third book, The Happiness Myth, which starts there and goes on to look at present-day attitudes about how to be happy. She calls it "a work of Skepticism in the modern sense of debunking."
In 2023, Hecht published The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and Poetry of Our Lives, combining her interests of poetry and atheism, in which she explores finding meaning to life through poetry, rather than religion.

== Philosophy ==