Seamus Montgomery

Seamus is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. Here he teaches courses on cultural representations, beliefs and practices and ethnographic methods. His research has been primarily with and about EU civil servants in Brussels, focusing on the intersections of European identity and bureaucracy in the European Commission. Spanning the frontiers between political identity, supranational belonging and the politics of representation, he is interested in how democratic institutions fail and succeed to maintain public trust. He currently conducts research on political affect and emotion, tracing how emotional practices engender narratives of identity politics and how identity narratives, in turn, reproduce and make sense of new embodied experiences. He received his MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and his BA in English, Anthropology and Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington. Broader areas of interest include: identity and modernity; anthropological engagements with the future; Europeanization and elite bureaucratic cultures; emotional labour and moral agency; the history and consumption of modern popular culture.