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Emily Stevenson

Profile

Biography

Emily Stevenson is a Lecturer in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature and a member of the interdisciplinary Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at York. She has previously studied at the University of Warwick, King’s College London and the University of Liverpool, and completed her PhD at the University of Oxford in 2021. Her research focuses on sixteenth and seventeenth travel writing, with particular focus on Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. She has published articles in Cultural and Social History and Renaissance Studies on topics such as Hakluyt’s religious views, the structure and social dynamics of the Levant Company, and the autobiography of Rose Lok, written in the early seventeenth century.

She is also a member of the Hakluyt Society council, having been elected in 2022. From 2018-2022 she was a member of the TIDE (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c, 1550-1700) project based at the University of Oxford, first as a Doctoral Researcher and then as a Postdoctoral Researcher. She has previously taught at the University of Liverpool, the University of Reading, and was a Retained Lecturer at Exeter College, University of Oxford.

Emily is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral research, which will draw together literary, historical and social network analysis to examine Principal Navigations in context. She is also working on a research project examining the lives of mercantile women in early modern Britain.

Research

Overview

Emily’s research focuses on sixteenth and seventeenth travel writing, with particular focus on Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral research which will combine historical, literary, and social network analysis to reassess the contexts surrounding Principal Navigations. She has published articles in Cultural and Social History and Renaissance Studies on topics including Hakluyt’s religious views, the structure and social dynamics of the Levant Company, and the autobiography of Rose Lok, written in the early seventeenth century.

Her current research project examines the lives of mercantile women in early modern Britain, using a combination of social network and literary analysis to examine their communities and the works they produced. This project will begin with research to build a biographical database, which will be published as an open access resource.

From 2018-2022 she was a member of the TIDE (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c, 1550-1700) project based at the University of Oxford. As a member of the project she contributed to the publications Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England (2021) and wrote three chapters for Lives in Transit in Early Modern England: Identity and Belonging (2022). In September 2021, she co-curated From Middle Temple to Manoa at the Middle Temple Library in London, an exhibition showcasing global networks at the early modern Inns of Court. She is working on another exhibition on these networks to be held at the Bodleian Library in 2023, as well as a jointly authored chapter for an edited collection based on this research and a chapter examining Travel Knowledge for an Oxford University Press handbook.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Emily teaches on The Renaissance and Spices and Spies: Renaissance and Global Travel modules.

Contact details

Dr Emily Stevenson
Department of English and Related Literature
University of York
Heslington
York
North Yorkshire
YO10 5DD

Tel: +44 (0)1904 323979