Kiene is author of Musically Sublime (New York: Fordham UP, 2009), a study into the idea of the sublime set against practices and philosophies of music in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Forthcoming is Crazy Literature, a book on literature in the 20th century as a deeply experimental art that creatively challenges the dominance of narrative form. 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. In the early 2000s, Kiene started a long collaboration with the artist duo Heringa/VanKalsbeek, co-authoring the catalogue for their solo exhibition in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Controlled Accidents. 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.

Kiene is editor of two books 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). In 2019, she was guest editor of a special issue on paradoxes of creativity for the Journal of Creative Behaviour (Wiley). In 2018, she was guest editor of a special issue on new poetics and new materialities of storytelling entitled Literature and the Material Turn for the journal Comparative Literature (Duke UP). For the Minnesota Review of Critical and Creative Writing she is co-editor of a one-and-a-half special issue on Mobilizing Creativity in the Humanties,(Duke UP, 2022).