PhD, University of California, Irvine
About
Professor Kuiken's areas of research include the Environmental Humanities broadly conceived, Romantic Literature and Culture and contemporary critical theory and eco-criticism. His most recent book is entitled Adrift on the Earth: Caribbean Romanticism and Geopoetics. It examines shifting conceptions of the Earth and ecology in the nineteenth century through the lens of contemporary Caribbean writing, identifying a “geopoetics”—a form of writing on and about the Earth— that extends from the nineteenth century to the present and that challenges the conceptual scaffolding underpinning the colonial and neo-colonial legacies that have produced what we now call the Anthropocene.
He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Earth and the Ends of Worlds in Post-Phenomenological Thought which examines the ecological, political and philosophical consequences of the distinction between Earth and world in Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida in order to articulate an alternative genealogy of eco-critical thought for the present.
Research
Publications
Books
Adrift on the Earth: Caribbean Romanticism and Geopoetics (Stanford University Press, 2026)
Interview with Kir Kuiken and Deborah Elise White on Haiti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution on Conversations in Atlantic Theory with John E. Drabinski, April 19, 2022
Haiti's Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism (Fordham University Press, 2014)
Recent Publications
“Günderrode’s Earth: on the Political Ecology of ‘Life,’ European Romantic Review 34.3, (2023): 369-376.
"Hölderlin's Earth" in special issue on "Romanticism and Political Ecology," Romantic Praxis (forthcoming)
"Introduction to Romanticism and Political Ecology," Romantic Praxis (forthcoming).
"Unavowed Community in Kleist's Betrothal in San Domingo," Haiti's Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution: New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2022, 117-39. Winner of the Keats-Shelley Association of America’s Essay Award, 2022.
“Impasse, Promise, and Impossible Community: Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Blanchot’s Community of Lovers,” Comparative Literature, 72.2 (2020): 128-143.
“Bio-Inscriptionality: The Eternal Return and Reproduction in Derrida’s Life/Death Seminar,” Biotheory: Life and Death After Capitalism, Routledge Press, 2020, 63-79.
“Bidding up on the Question of Sovereignty: Derrida Between Kant and Benjamin,” Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida’s Seminar and the New Abolitionism, New York: Fordham University Press 2018, 119-138.
“Eclipse of the Gaze: Nancy, Community and the Death of the Other”: Dead Theory: Derrida, Death and the Afterlife of Theory, New York: Bloomsbury Press 2016, 173-190.