I work on literature and economics (in the so-called ‘Economic Humanities’), literary theory and modernism, and am interested not only in how economic changes impact literary forms, but also the various ways the economy itself constitutes a symbolic system. My forthcoming monograph, Prehistoric Capitalism, examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorists and writers conceived the origin of language and production. I have written articles on Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, J.M. Coetzee, Daniel Defoe, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, amongst others. I also consider broader cultural and historical questions and how these bear on what Jean-Joseph Goux calls the “symbolic economies” of the twentieth century: the Weimar Hyperinflation, post-industrial capitalism, platform labour, debt and the commodity. I am primarily drawn to the philosophy of language as it develops through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and have published widely on modernism, economy and critical theory.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Monographs and Edited Collections
Journal Articles
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2027
2026
2025
2025
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Kieran Silbert Brown & Wayne Stables, “Uprising Marks: Walter Benjamin, Inflation and Bare Life,” New Literary History vol. 58 (forthcoming)
Kieran Silbert Brown, “Recasting Pound’s Economy,” Textual Practice (30 April 2026), pp. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2026.2663425
Kieran Brown, “Cosmic Society: On Language and Economy in Walter Benjamin,” Angelaki 30.5 (2025), pp. 54-69. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2025.2554143
Kieran Brown, “Faux Apparitions: Angels or Cannibals, between Coetzee and Defoe,” Critique 66.3 (2025), pp. 585-597. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2024.2338829
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Book Chapters
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2027
2027
2026
2026
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Kieran Silbert Brown, "Walter Benjamin, German Romanticism and Goethe," in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin and Literature (forthcoming).
Kieran Silbert Brown, “T.S. Eliot, out of South Africa,” Special Forum: Eliot Beyond Borders. T.S. Eliot Studies Annual vol. 9 (forthcoming).
Kieran Brown, “Mark of Shame: On the Surface of the Weimar Hyperinflation,” in Inflationary Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), pp. 169-190. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-08961-8_7
Kieran Brown and Wayne Stables, “Introduction,” to Inflationary Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-08961-8_1
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I teach Prelims Paper 3 (Literature from 1830-1910), Prelims Paper 4 (Literature from 1910-Present) and Prelims Paper 1b (Approaches to Literature). I have supervised numerous third-year dissertations on a variety of topics.
I came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from South Africa in 2019. I completed my Masters in 2020 and my DPhil in 2024. You can find out more information by visiting my website: https://kieransilbertbrown.netlify.app/
