Paul Robertson 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 Prof Pamela Clemit on The Letters of William Godwin for Oxford University Press (6 vols, in progress, 2011-), recently working on Volume IV (1816-28) and due to start work on Volume V (1829-36). He also assisted Prof Gregory Dart on the Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb for Oxford University Press (6 vols, in progress), working on the holograph manuscripts of Lamb's 'Elian' essays for Volume IV: Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia. He is currently editing Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) for Volume III of the edition.

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 (2019 to present), having recently held to same positions for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2022-25). 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.