Rate My Professor Jennifer Windt

Jennifer Windt is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, where she also holds an affiliation with the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, in 2012. From 2009 to 2015, she served as an assistant lecturer and researcher in philosophy at Mainz, managing the MIND Group, before joining Monash as a Lecturer in 2015 and advancing to Senior Lecturer. Her academic trajectory reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary work at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science.

Windt's research centers on spontaneous thoughts and experiences decoupled from ongoing tasks and environmental demands, encompassing mind wandering, dreaming, self-consciousness, and the dynamics of consciousness across sleep-wake states. She explores foundational questions about consciousness, wakefulness, sleep stages, minimal conditions for self-experience, and links to cognitive agency and mental autonomy through theoretical analysis and collaborative empirical studies. Key publications include her book Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Research (MIT Press, 2015), which won the 2018 William James Prize from the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness; Measuring consciousness in dreams: The lucidity and consciousness in dreams scale (Consciousness and Cognition, 2013); Predicting lapses of attention with sleep-like slow waves (Nature Communications, 2021); and Does consciousness disappear in dreamless sleep? (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2016). She co-edited Open MIND (MIT Press, 2016) with Thomas Metzinger and co-founded the open-access journal Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, serving as editor-in-chief. Windt has received the Barbara Wengeler Prize (2012), Faculty of Arts Dean’s Award and Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence by Early Career Researchers (both 2017), and Faculty of Arts Dean’s Research Award (2021). Her work is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. She supervises PhD students, including on neurophenomenology of dreaming, and delivers invited talks at international conferences on consciousness and dreaming.