I am an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at William & Mary and the Book Review Editor for Economic Anthropology.
My research and teaching interests include capitalism, the state, cash transfers, work, value, morality, ethnography, and contemporary Europe (particularly the Nordic countries). My scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Quarterly, Economic Anthropology, and other journals and volumes. My first book project, Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway (University of Toronto Press), examines the everyday lives of the unemployed in Norway in order to rethink the Nordic welfare model as a system of sociocultural and moral incorporation.
My fieldwork in Norway and writing have been supported by the Fulbright Program (2010-2011, 2023-2024), the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, the Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education, the Princeton Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. In 2018, I was awarded the Harold K. Schneider Student Prize in Economic Anthropology by the Society for Economic Anthropology.
Before Moving to Williamsburg, I taught for several years at Southern Methodist University, where I co-founded the endowed Caroline B. Brettell Seminars in Anthropology. Prior to that, I received my PhD (2019) and MA (2014) in Anthropology from Princeton University. I also have an A.B. in Literary Arts and International Relations from Brown University, where I was awarded Honors in Creative Writing for writing, of all things, a novella.
Kelly McKowen 