Jeffrey Murer

My research explores the psychological processes associated with collective and individual identity formation particularly in the context of conflict and collective violence.  I am interested in how anxiety functions as a political motivator, and how perceptions of material change can prompt political action and collective violence.  I have examined such phenomena in the contexts of expressions of anti-Semitism in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe, the wars of the Former Yugoslavia, and in the conflicts of the Northern Caucasus.  My present research projects analyze the processes of identity formation in immigrant communities in Western Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom.  My research explores the relationship between a changing ethnic polity and perceptions of the state and community membership.  I ask the questions of how collectivities form a sense of identity through exclusion, and how new arrivals are to attach to majority or establish identity forms, or indeed whether they can.

My research is at the intersection of sociology, politics, and psychoanalysis, where I explores the performances of collective identity through acts of violence and works of imagination. I have received research grants from the British Council, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Independent Social Research Foundation, among others. In 2018 I was a Visiting Fellow at Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge; previously, I was an Academic Fellow of the Psychoanalytic Centre of Philadelphia, and a National Fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I have received a number of teaching and research awards and my research appears in journals such as Topique: Revue Freudian; Terrorism and Political Violence; Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society; and The International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. In 2017 I was made a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.   

Generally in my research I explore the confluences of conflict, collective violence, terrorism, psychology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, cultural studies, identity formation, and political economy.