His primary research interests are in the politics of language, the role of literature in the making and maintaining of social worlds, and the romantic impulse in anthropology and in ordinary language philosophy. His first book, Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin (2023), examines Berlin’s rise in popular discourse as a world capital for cultural production, in times marked by resurgent ethno-nationalism, migrant “crisis,” and renewed threats to the freedom of expression. He is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Listening in a Minor Key, on the literary company social scientists keep, and its influence on their thought.
He is the co-editor of four books and special issues: Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (2021); A Matter of Detail (forthcoming); The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations (2023); and Ordinary Aesthetics (2023). His work has also appeared in or is in press with several leading journals, including Current Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Ethnos, Annual Review of Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, as well as in numerous edited collections.
Brandel has a PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, he held positions at Harvard University and Penn State University. From 2016-2017, he was a Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna.
Since 2021, he is a series co-editor for the Fordham University Press series Thinking from Elsewhere.