Profile
Biography
Kevin Killeen has research interests in early-modern science and intellectual history, poetics and rhetoric. His most recent book, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable (Stanford University Press, 2023), is a study of the apophatic and the theopoetics of early modern thought, and considers how science, theology and literature were intermeshed in the era. It was the Winner of the 2024 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, sponsored by the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference (SCSC), as well as the winner of the John T. Shawcross Prize, awarded by the Milton Society of America.
Kevin is one of the researchers in the AHRC-DFG funded project ‘Scientific poetry and poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (1580-1750)’, which runs from 2024-2027 and is a collaboration between several universities and researchers, including alongside Kevin Killeen (York), Cassie Gorman (Anglia Ruskin), Florian Klaeger (Bayreuth) and Hania Siebenpfeiffer (Marburg).
Kevin received his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London and lectured at Birkbeck and the University of Leeds, before coming to York with a Leverhulme fellowship, out of which emerged a monograph The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which looks at the cultural uses of the biblical kings and the Old Testament in the Renaissance, and the ways in which it was used as a vibrant and combative political language. He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2015), with Helen Smith and Rachel Willie.
Earlier work addressed the religious, philosophical and political landscape of mid-century England, including a monograph on Sir Thomas Browne, Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2009), which won the CCUE book prize, and Sir Thomas Browne: Oxford 21st Century Authors (Oxford, 2014), an edition of a scholar and scientist with a bewildering range of interests. Kevin is currently editing Browne's encyclopaedia of error, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), with Jessica Woolf, as volumes 2 and 3 of Oxford Works of Sir Thomas Browne and Volume 4 of the edition, Urne-Buriall, Garden of Cyrus, Christian Morals, Letter to a Friend with Claire Preston. His recent work includes essays on Anne Southwell, Anna Trapnel, Abraham Cowley, John Donne, Sir John Davies and Phineas Fletcher.
Kevin is the editor of the international journal, Renaissance Studies, and is a member of the the council of the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Research
Overview
Kevin’s research looks at English Renaissance literature and the intellectual climate of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on the religious and scientific cultures of the period, the centrality of the Bible in early modern thought, and the political language of the era. He is currently working on a book, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: apophatic and scientific poetics, which looks at how early modern writers, including Jacob Boehme, Anna Trapnel and John Milton, respond to the incoherence and unfathomable character of the fallen world. Alongside this, it shows how early-modern scientific writing borrows from the same apophatic inheritance, a stock of rhetorical and poetic strategies for grappling at the edge of what can and cannot be said, responding to what seemed the impenetrable and paradoxical nature of the world.
Kevin’s most recent book, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2017), looked at the political uses of the biblical kings and the Old Testament in the renaissance, and he published work on this topic in The Journal of the History of Ideas and The Huntington Library Quarterly, as well as editing, with Helen Smith and Rachel Willie, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700 (Oxford, 2015) which won the Roland H Bainton Prize, 2016.
He is the author of Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2009), which won the CCUE Book Prize and which was shortlisted for the US History of Science Society Watson Davis Prize. With Liz Oakley-Brown, he edited a volume of The Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2017, Scrutinizing Surfaces, writing on Margaret Cavendish, Robert Boyle and the Roman epic poet, Lucretius. Together with Peter Forshaw, he edited Biblical Exegesis and the Emergence of Science in the Early Modern Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
He has edited a one-volume edition of Sir Thomas Browne: Oxford 21st Century Authors (Oxford, 2014) and is one of the editors of the new eight-volume Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne, commissioned by Oxford University Press and supported by an AHRC grant, under the general editorship of Claire Preston (Queen Mary). This involves a full scholarly editing of Browne’s labyrinthine and encyclopaedic Pseudodoxia Epidemica, together with Jessica Wolfe (North Carolina) and Harriet Phillips (Queen Mary).
Supervision
He would be happy to supervise PhD research on:
- Early-modern Intellectual History, broadly imagined
- Early-modern science and religion
- The Bible and its reception history
- Early modern prose - Thomas Browne in particular
- Renaissance poetry - Milton, Donne and seventeenth-century women’s poetry
Teaching
Undergraduate
Kevin teaches undergraduate courses in Renaissance and Restoration Literature, and has taught courses on Milton, on Poetry and Poetics, and the Bible and Literature in the contemporary novel. He also teaches on first-year introductions to literature, on postcolonial literature and theory and Marxist literary theory. He has convened courses on Derek Walcott and postcolonial epic, on contemporary Poetry and on Shakespeare.
At postgraduate level, he teaches on the Renaissance Literature MA, and the CREMS MA in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. On these, he runs classes on early modern Humanism, Shakespeare, and an MA module of intellectual history, ‘Theories of Everything in Early Modern England’, which addresses science and religion, encyclopaedism, the diffusion of the classical philosophy in early modern thought and poetry, particularly Milton’s Paradise Lost and John Donne.
