Andrew Brandel

Brinkley Messick seated second from the right.

I am sad to learn of the passing of Brinkley Messick, a great scholar and ethnographer, a dear colleague with whom I worked very closely with for more than a decade. Here he is at a panel celebrating his wonderful book *Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology* in 2018.

“If the universities—or in this case a university press—are not willing to stand up for what is core to their mission, I don’t know what they’re doing. What’s the point?”

Brandel Andrew, 2023, Moving Words. Literature, Memory, and Migrati... L’ouvrage d’Andrew Brandel se présente comme une exploration dans tous les sens du terme. Il s’agit d’abord d’une exploration extrêmement stimulante de ce que signifie faire de la littérature aujou...

Extremely grateful to Maëline Le Lay for this review in Cahiers de littérature orale
journals.openedition.org/clo/14406

Re-envisioning Book Reviews — American Anthropologist By Andrew Brandel

Since everyone is online today, it seems like as good a time as any to remind everyone to send me proposals or initial ideas for book review essays for @amanthro.bsky.social. Open to all kinds of creative and critical ideas!

Read more here:
tinyurl.com/4f2987rc

Re-envisioning Book Reviews — American Anthropologist By Andrew Brandel

Since everyone is online today, it seems like as good a time as any to remind everyone to send me proposals or initial ideas for book review essays for @amanthro.bsky.social. Open to all kinds of creative and critical ideas!

Read more here:
tinyurl.com/4f2987rc

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o : The Language of Languages - Tin House Today’s guest, novelist, storyteller, essayist, playwright, scholar, translator, and perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is an iconic figure in postcolonial tho...

R.I.P. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
ICYMI here's Ngũgĩ's appearance on the show where we explored the many ways he has fought against the "normalized abnormality" of the colonial world, in language & writing, and in the world at large
tinhouse.com/podcast/ngug...

Looking forward to reading this!

No doubt they’ll find some shills from APL to be on a panel with them and the flat earthers

Johns Hopkins works to bolster intellectual pluralism across the university Partnership with American Enterprise Institute scholars includes collaborative research, teaching, and graduate pipeline projects; other initiatives aim to increase heterodox faculty across the univer...

Incredibly embarrassing to cede this clearly bad faith premise about intellectual diversity. “Heterodox faculty” is a well-known, paper thin veil for anti-intellectualism. So disgraceful if unsurprising that liberal academics are giving this cover.

hub.jhu.edu/2025/04/21/j...

Starting the quarter with the 1843 Brief an Ruge. Can’t shake the feeling that it’s really a moment for it

@modernlanguage.bsky.social hmm, suddenly very concerned about democratic norms, free speech, and the urgency of the moment.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Fund Don't Freeze: National Higher Education Strategy Call. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Join higher education workers from around the country on 2/13 at 8 PM Eastern / 7 PM Central / 6 PM Mountain / 5 PM Pacific for a national strategy call on the federal attack on higher education and h...

The only hope for higher ed is the academic labor movement. Join this @higheredlabor.bsky.social call next week to plan our fight us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Have you done the differences in producing/writing a second book? It feels different to me but I don’t see as many articles on the process

Contributed a piece to the Lent Edition of the Cambridge Social Anthropology Magazine on the theme of Fiction/s, edited by their thoughtful and creative graduate students

Contributed a piece to the Lent Edition of the Cambridge Social Anthropology Magazine on the theme of Fiction/s, edited by their thoughtful and creative graduate students

When's this coming out? Looking forward to reading!

a pandemic project is now out: a special issue on prison literatures in the middle east, eds. anne-marie mcmanus & brahim el guabli docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol25... walaa quisay and i wrote a short programmatic piece on how (not) to think about prison islam. i learned a lot from the other pieces

What Even the Cowherds and Women Know:Everyday Life and Its Promise In this commentary I interrogate the implicit picture of anthropological knowledge as vulnerable to errors because its primary scene is taken to be an encounter with an alien society. Using a method o...

veena das - what even the cowherds and women know: everyday life and its promise www.academia.edu/126710656/Wh... a prospective retrospective

Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica | The Art Institute of Chicago The first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations gathers together some 350 objects, spanning the 1920s to the present, made by artists on four continents: Africa, Nor...

I’m not remotely unbiased but this show is so, so good—incredible to see a big museum show with this kind of conceptual coherence through hundreds of pieces from across a century and much of the world

I've recently joined the American Anthropologist team led by the incomparable @labspeceth.bsky.social as an Associate Editor. One of our goals for this coming year is to re-envision book reviews. Starting in 2025, we will be moving toward soliciting longer, critical review essays.

And if you have an idea for an essay, please get in touch! I'd love to talk about it!

Re-envisioning Book Reviews — American Anthropologist By Andrew Brandel

To learn more about the idea, check out the new blog post on the AA website, and make sure to read @labspeceth.bsky.social's essay about book reviews linked there.

I've recently joined the American Anthropologist team led by the incomparable @labspeceth.bsky.social as an Associate Editor. One of our goals for this coming year is to re-envision book reviews. Starting in 2025, we will be moving toward soliciting longer, critical review essays.

Winter issue is coming soon!

I’d love to be part of this (if you’ll tolerate an anthropologist interloper)

I'm sorry not to be at AAA this year (I have a conflict this week). Next year, I'll be back in person, but for now, drop by the Ingram table for our recent books, and check out our virtual exhibit.

Excellent idea! I’d love to join one

I knew there had to be someone ha!