About

 

Andrew Graan is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist with interests in mass media, political language and performance, publics and publicity, the social life of projects, nation branding, international intervention, and global governance in Macedonia, the Balkans, and the European Union.

He earned his Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2010 and has previously taught anthropology at the University of Virginia and Wake Forest University. From 2013-2016 he served as Assistant Director of the University of Chicago Center for International Studies.  After a visiting fellowship at the University of Helsinki in 2016-17, he joined the Anthropology Program as a University Lecturer from 2018-2020.  Currently, he is a Researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki.  In January 2023, he will join the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies as a Core Fellow.

His current project, “Brand Nationalism: Neoliberal Statecraft and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia,” has received support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Kone Foundation. The project examines how the coordinated efforts to regulate public communication that are found in nation branding projects constitute a wider program of economic and social governance. He is also completing a book manuscript titled, “The Sovereignty Trap: International Intervention and the Public Sphere in Postconflict Macedonia”, which examines European and American diplomats’ involvement in the political reform process that followed Macedonia’s 2001 armed conflict. He has numerous publications, including research articles that have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Signs and Society, Slavic Review, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and the Journal of Cultural Economy. He edited, introduced, and contributed to a special section on “Language and Political Economy, Revisited” that appeared in HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

Photo Credit: Natasha Geleva