Kieran Brown

Thesis Title: The Script of Capital: On Language and Economy in Walter Benjamin

Thesis Description: My dissertation investigates the ways language is alienated from the sites of its production. Although the work of Walter Benjamin provides the most important resource for thinking through this problem, an array of other writes -- from Carol Jacobs to Giorgio Agamben, Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe -- are also crucial. My thesis suggests not only that the rise of industrial capitalism in the mid-19th century coincides with a new reification of language (what Benjamin calls "the empty phrase"), but also that Benjamin's entire philosophical project can be understood as an attempt to reunite language with economy: "in short, work itself comes to the word."

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

Research Interests: 20th Century Literary Theory; Modernism (Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, the Harlem Renaissance writers); 18th-19th century German Thought (Kant, Hegel, Marx and the German Romantics); Structuralism and Poststructuralism (de Saussure, Derrida, Agamben); Economy and Economic Theory, (in particular the intersections between literature and economy); 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 (Retaining Fee Lecturer: 2023) and again in 2024 (Retaining 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

Selected Publications: 
"Faux Apparitions: Angels or Cannibals, between Coetzee and Defoe" Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, doi:10.1080/00111619.2024.2338829
"Cosmic Society: On Language and Economy in Walter Benjamin," Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities (forthcoming)
Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture and Economy after 1789, edited and introduced by Kieran Brown and Wayne Stables, Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming [2025])