Dr. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is professor of Literature and Comparative Media at Utrecht University and program director of Medical Humanities at UMCU/Utrecht University 

Kiene has an interdisciplinary focus in Comparative Literature. Trained in literature and film on the MA level (cum laude), she pursued a PhD in music and music philosophy (cum laude), with a focus on Anglophone, French, and German aesthetics. She has since developed a research line in creativity studies, comprising literature, music, (new) media, and comparative philosophy. In 2021, she became program director of the interdisciplinary MSc Medical Humanities and has since developed ways of integrating student wellbeing into academic teaching through contemplative practices. She was Head of Humanities at University College Utrecht between 2017 and 2020, and director of graduate studies for the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication between 2013 and 2017. Between 2021 and 2025, Kiene was section head of Comparative Literature, and between 2022 and 2025, she was co-leader of the research group Modern and Contemporary Literature (ICON) at Utrecht. Between 2011 and 2016, she was project leader of the NWO-funded VIDI research project Back to the Book and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2010-2011. Kiene is a member of the New Utrecht School (Medical Science) and co-founder of the interdisciplinary platform UPCE, which seeks to empower creativity in primary, secondary, and higher education. She has been a member of the research committee on Literature, Arts, and Media (CLAM) of the International Comparative Literature Association since 2018, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal for Possibility Studies and Society since 2022. 

Research
Kiene's research focuses on creativity as a material, transformative process in the context of the arts, education, and (mental) health. Using process philosophy and indigenous, classical Chinese ways of thinking, she approaches creativity as a non-instrumental and relational activity, rather than a uniquely human, personal ability. Complexity is key to understanding this ongoing activity. She is the author of Musically Sublime (New York: Fordham UP), a study into ideas of the sublime set against practices and philosophies of music in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Forthcoming is Crazy Arts, a book proposing concepts from Daoist and Huayan philosophical thinking to approach creativity and experimental art. This approach challenges established views in creativity research, while it also aims to enrich practices in education and care. She is also co-author of The Life of Texts. An introduction to literary studies (AUP 2019) and, in an earlier edition, of Het leven van teksten. Een Inleiding in de literatuurwetenschap (Amsterdam UP, 2006, 2008). Her inaugural address Het schrijven aan de wand: literatuur in de toekomst (The Writing on the Wall: Literature in the Future), on literature, new media, and the future of writing, was held and published in 2015. 

Kiene is the editor of two volumes and three special issues. The volumes are on literature, book history, and new media technologies: Book Presence in a Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2018) and Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace (Fordham/Oxford UP 2012). The three special issues are on creativity and materiality research: a guest-edited special issue on paradoxes of creativity for the Journal of Creative Behaviour (Wiley) in 2019, an invited, guest-edited special issue on new poetics and new materialities of storytelling entitled Literature and the Material Turn for the journal Comparative Literature (Duke UP) 2018, and a co-edited one-and-a-half special issue on Mobilizing Creativity in the Humanties for the Minnesota Review of Critical and Creative Writing (Duke UP) in 2023. Since the late 1990s, Kiene has also authored numerous articles in international, peer-reviewed journals and volumes on literature, intermediality, music, satire, aesthetics, and, since more recently, East Asian philosophical perspectives on creativity and experimental writing (see: Publications).

In the early 2000s, Kiene started a long collaboration with the artist duo Heringa/VanKalsbeek, co-authoring the catalog for their solo exhibition in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Controlled Accidents (2007) as well as for their exhibition Spring Tide at the Kunstmuseum The Hague (2023): "Moving like Water" in Area of Impact. 

Teaching 
Kiene teaches R/MA courses on literature and comparative media, the RMA research lab, and BA courses on poetic language in Dao and Zen as philosophy, creativity, literary theory and intermediality (literature, film, and music), literature and human rights, and current theories and world literature. She lectures in the Netherlands and abroad on her research and related interests, such as mastering creativity and creative thinking for medical humanities.

Visit the staff website of our section
Visit the Research group Modern and Contemporary Literature (part of ICON) at Utrecht 
Visit Kiene's work on Researchgate