Kieran Brown

(Working) Thesis Title: Scripted Capital - On the Economic Writings of Walter Benjamin

Thesis Description: My dissertation examines the relations between language, literature and economy in Walter Benjamin's thought. It also looks at how the turn to the philosophy of language in the early 20th century influenced receptions of Marxism. I have chapters on i) language and economy; ii) the commodity and poetry; iii) speech acts and strike action; iv) inflation. 

Supervisor: Prof. Michael Whitworth and the late Prof. Laura Marcus

Research Interests: 20th Century Literary Theory; Modernism (from Woolf, Joyce, Beckett to the Harlem Renaissance); 18th-19th century German Thought (Kant, Hegel, Marx and the German Romantics); Structuralism and Poststructuralism (from de Saussure to Derrida and Giorgio Agamben); Economy and Economic Theory, in particular the intersections between literature and economy (as found, for instance, in the novels of Daniel Defoe and Dickens, the poetry Baudelaire and Ezra Pound, and the philosophy of Jean Joseph-Goux); Theory of the Novel (particularly Lukacs and Benjamin); J.M. Coetzee and South African fiction. 

Teaching: I have held several lectureships at different colleges. I have taught modernism and literary theory to 1st years at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (Stipendiary Lectureship: 2022), modernism to 1st years at Somerville, Oxford (Retainer Fee Lecturer: 2023) and will be teaching part of a literary theory course as well as the modernism course again to Somerville first years in 2024 (Retainer Fee Lectureship). I have also taught 3rd year exchange students from the U.S. and am supervising several 3rd year dissertations (on Ocean Vuong, Irish Literature, the Harlem Renaissance and 20th century Utopian fiction). 

Funding: Rhodes Scholarship (South Africa at-Large & Hertford College, 2019); The Skye Foundation Scholarship