I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at SMU 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 first book project, based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, Norway, examines the everyday lives of the unemployed in order to rethink the Nordic welfare model as a system of sociocultural and moral incorporation.
My recent publications include an article on Norway’s “unemployment business” in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a book chapter on unemployed migrants for Migration and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). I have also published an edited volume on migrant incorporation and belonging in Europe, an article on work ethics and welfare regimes in Economic Anthropology, and an article on job-seeker courses and neoliberalism in the Anthropology of Work Review.
My research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, 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 coming to SMU, 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 