Somerville College
Oxford OX2 6HD
United Kingdom

Kieran Brown

(also Kieran Silbert Brown)

I am a researcher and lecturer at the University of Oxford, working primarily on literature and economics (in the so-called 'Economic Humanities'). In my spare time, I also consult on economic development, green energy and industrialisation (find me on LinkedIn). As a Rhodes Scholar, I received my DPhil (PhD) in English from Hertford College, Oxford, in November 2024. I am currently working on turning my dissertation on Walter Benjamin's economic writings into a book.

I completed my undergraduate and honours degrees in economics and literature at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where I grew up. In 2020, I received my Masters degree in English (1900-present) from the University of Oxford, having written a dissertation on Samuel Beckett's Trilogy and economics. For my DPhil, I received funding from the Rhodes Scholarship, Skye Foundation Scholarship and Scatcherd European Scholarship. During this time, I was also a visiting researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2023) and the University of Cape Town (2024).

I have a forthcoming edited collection with Palgrave Macmillan due to be published at the end of the year, entitled Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture and Economy, and have published widely in peer reviewed journals on modernism, economy and critical theory. You can find my Google Scholar page.

I lecture at Somerville College, Oxford.

As the consumer price index reaches historic highs across the world, the need to think inflation in all its aspects has never been more urgent. Collecting 10 essays from prominent and emerging scholars of diverse backgrounds, Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture and Economy offers distinctive perspectives from both the Global North and South – a range appropriate to the multifaceted phenomenon it takes as its object of investigation. Collectively, these essays emphasize the importance of the volume’s topic. If inflation frustrates the economists’ best efforts to theorize it coherently, the time has come to ask questions about where the boundaries of economics lie, and to reevaluate the assumption that inflation is primarily an economic phenomenon. Rather than offering a dogmatic analysis that would assert what inflation really is, Inflationary Modernities theorizes its shifting forms, furnishing the reader with a multi-dimensional, non-totalizing understanding of its mechanisms. In doing so, the book opens up new possibilities for grappling with one of the most pressing problems of our time.

Inflationary Modernities is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan and should be out near the end of 2025.