Dr Kieran Brown

kieran brown
Lecturer in English
Somerville College
kieran.brown@some.ox.ac.uk

I lecture Prelims Paper 3 (literature from 1830-1910), Prelims Paper 4 (literature from 1910-present) and Prelims Paper 1b (approaches to literature) at Somerville College.

I work primarily on literature and economics (in the so-called 'Economic Humanities'), literary theory and modernism. I have written on Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, J.M. Coetzee, Daniel Defoe, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. 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. 

You can find out more by visiting my website: https://kieransilbertbrown.netlify.app/ 

 

Selected Publications:

Monographs and Edited Collections

  1. Wayne Stables and Kieran Brown (eds.), Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture and Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-08961-8

Journal Articles

  1. Kieran Silbert Brown & Wayne Stables, “Uprising Marks: Walter Benjamin, Inflation and Bare Life,” New Literary History vol. 58 (2027, forthcoming)
  2. Kieran Silbert Brown, “Recasting Pound’s Economy,” Textual Practice (30 April 2026), pp. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2026.2663425  
  3. 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
  4. Kieran Brown, “Faux Apparitions: Angels or Cannibals, between Coetzee and Defoe,” Critique 66.3 (2024), pp. 585-597. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2024.2338829

Book Chapters

  1. Kieran Silbert Brown, “T.S. Eliot, out of South Africa,” Special Forum: Eliot Beyond Borders. T.S. Eliot Studies Annual vol. 9 (2027, forthcoming).
  2. 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
  3. 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