Bryan Boyle

I am a PhD student and teaching assistant at the Sociology Department and BRISPO Research Group at the VUB. I am also a member of the European Centre for the Study of Culture and Inequality.

For my thesis, I am conducting an ethnography of the ‘butler’ profession, a profession that has experienced a surprising revival as wealthy groups and other elites again seek their expertise in private service. In the spirit of a carnal ‘enactive ethnography’, I actually trained at a butler school and worked as a butler in the UK. By understanding how butlers procure status (or ‘distinction’) for their employers through their labour, my case study intends to offer novel contributions to theoretical debates in cultural sociology, labour sociology, and the sociology of elites.

I teach on four different courses on the Bachelor of Social Sciences programme: Critical Thinking in Sociology, Key Social Thinkers, and Seminar Current Issues I and II. Amongst other duties, this involves leading reading groups that centre around seminal texts in the fields of core sociological theory, the sociology of violence, social justice and critical race theory. I am also a Promotor for Bachelor dissertations where I supervise papers under the topic: ‘Serving the (super-)rich: Service labour in a Pickettian world’.

I have undertaken a visiting scholarship at the University of Amsterdam as well as research stays at the London School of Economics. I obtained my Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam in 2017 and my Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Politics from Nottingham Trent University in 2014.