Professor Killen specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of modern Europe, especially Germany. The recipient of fellowships at the UCLA Humanities Consortium in Los Angeles and the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, he recently completed a book on psychiatry and the invention of "nervousness" as a medical and cultural response to the modernizing process in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. He is currently working on a project on relations between film and the human sciences in Germany.

• Modern Europe
• The Third Reich
• Psychiatry, Madness, and Modern Society
• The Modern European City
• Science, Technology, and Modernity

 Books and Edited Volumes

• Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (University of California Press 2006).
• Co-editor with G. Eghigian and C. Leuenberger, “The Self as Scientific and Political Project,” Osiris, Vol. 22 (2007).
• 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (Bloomsbury 2006).
• Co-editor with Stefan Andriopoulos, "Brainwashing and Mind Control from the Cold War to the War on Terror," Grey Room, v. 45 (2011)
• Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany.  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

Articles
 

• “Weimar Cinema between Enlightenment and Hypnosis”, in G. Prakash (ed), Fears Past: Emotional Histories, Troubled Times (Princeton University Press, forthcoming)
• "Homo Pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject," Grey Room, v. 45 (2011)
• “The Scene of the Crime: Psychiatric Discourses on Film Spectatorship in the Silent Era” in K. Kreimeier and A. Ligensa (eds), Media 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture (John Libbey, 2009)
• "Weimar Psychotechnics between Americanism and Nazism," Osiris, Vol. 22 (2007).
• "From Shock to Schreck: Psychiatrists, Telephone Operators, and Traumatic Neurosis in Germany, 1900-1926," Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 2 (April 2003).