Biography

Andrew Brandel is an Associate Instructional Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

His research explores how texts and textual practices move through different social worlds, and his ethnographic work has focused in particular on how literature becomes integral to the ways people ordinarily think and talk about how language works. He also frequently writes on the history of anthropological theory, and its connections to literature and philosophy, with an emphasis on ordinary language philosophy, romanticism, and postcolonial thought. He is the author of Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and the co-editor of four volumes: Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (Fordham University Press, 2021); A Matter of Detail (University of Toronto Press, forth.); The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations (Special Issue of Anthropology & Humanism, Vol 48(1), 2023); and Ordinary Aesthetics (Special Issue of Open Philosophy, 2023.)

Prior to coming to Chicago, he taught at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Penn State, and was a Visiting Fellow (2016-2017) of the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna.

He is also series co-editor for the Fordham University Press series Thinking from Elsewhere.