Paul Stephens

Dr Paul Stephens is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of York. His research explores the connections between literature and economics during the long eighteenth century (c.1680-1830), currently focusing on the ways that literary writers confronted the cost of living. He completed a DPhil in English (2022) and an AHRC-DTP Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2023) at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. He has been awarded Visiting Fellowships at the Huntington Library, California (2020), the University of Glasgow Library (2024), and recently received a Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grant from the Keats-Shelley Association of America (2024).

Textual Scholarship.  Paul is a research and editorial assistant to Pamela Clemit on The Letters of William Godwin for Oxford University Press (6 vols, in progress, 2011-), recently working on Volume IV (1816-28). He also provides editorial assistance to Gregory Dart on the Collected Works of Charles and Mary Lamb for Oxford University Press (6 vols, in progress), working on the surviving holograph manuscripts of the Elian essays. He is currently editing Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) for Volume III: Works for Children (ed. Felicity James).

Teaching.  Paul has held lectureships at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Oriel College, Oxford, where he taught undergraduates FHS I Papers 5 and 6, and supervised students at Oriel and Trinity for their FHS I Paper 7 Dissertation. He has also tutored for several years at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education, where he has designed and delivered several undergraduate courses on the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and where he was Programme Director for the Oxford-Duke Summer School at New College, Oxford (2023).

Projects.  Alongside his Leverhulme research, Paul is the co-lead investigator on a project entitled 'The Language of Debt' which explores the intellectual and cultural history of debt, and is on the steering committee of an AHRC-funded project 'Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Industry and Literature, 1770-1830'. He recently co-organised The Shelley Conference 2024, having co-organised the poet’s Bicentenary Conference in 2022. He also serves as a trustee and the treasurer for The Charles Lamb Society and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is now preparing his first book, Shelley and the Economic Imagination, that connects Shelley's economic ideas and his epistemological theory of the creative imagination.