Kelly McKowen

Bio

Kelly McKowen is a cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching interests include capitalism, the state, cash transfers, work, value, morality, ethnography, and contemporary Europe (particularly the Nordic countries). His scholarship on the welfare state, unemployment, and morality in contemporary Norway has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Economic Anthropology, the Anthropology of Work Review, and various edited volumes, including Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond (2018, Routledge), Digesting Difference: Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging in Europe (2020, Palgrave Macmillan), and Migration and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia (2022, University of Wisconsin Press). 

McKowen's research has 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.

Research Interests

Political Economy •  Work and Unemployment • Morality and Ethics • Digital Technology • Scandinavia

Courses Taught

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology • Cultural Aspects of Business • Culture and Diversity in American Life • Society and Culture in Contemporary Europe • History of Anthropology, Part Two • Advanced Seminar in Ethnology: Economy and Morality