Profile
Biography
Paul Stephens is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English, whose research focuses on the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century (c.1680–1830). His primary interest concerns the relationship between literature, economics, and philosophy, and how the creative imagination shapes the connections between these spheres of enquiry.
He is currently preparing his first book, Shelley and the Economic Imagination, which examines the economic thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The book explores the poet’s views on equality, value, growth, and debt, and connects these ideas to his economic reading and evolving philosophical thought. It offers a new theory of Shelley’s ‘economic imagination’, the faculty perceiving the connections between the economic (phenomena in the economic sphere), the epistemic (knowledge about this phenomena), and the cognitive (the mind’s production of knowledge). It demonstrates how, for Shelley, the imagination – stimulated by poetry – might help improve society by enhancing economic knowledge and activity.
His second book project, provisionally entitled Romanticism and the Cost of Living, investigates how ‘the cost of living’ – an idea that emerged in Britain during the Romantic period – was understood by literary writers to encompass both financial challenges and philosophical questions. Focused on writers including Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Thomas De Quincey, the book will examine the connections between their literary works (novels; poems; essays) and financial manuscripts (contracts; ledger books; letters on money matters). It aims to show how these writers anticipate modern debates on the psychological impact of financialisation, and the ways that human flourishing is shaped by the various costs of living under changing economic conditions.
Before coming to York, Paul was an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2023), where he also completed an MSt in Literature and Arts (2013) and an AHRC-funded DPhil in English (2022). He has been awarded Visiting Library Fellowships at the Huntington Library (2020) and the University of Glasgow (2024), a grant from the Open University’s Crowther Fund (2022), and a Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grant from the Keats-Shelley Association of America (2024). He also worked for several years as a Junior Dean at Lincoln College, Oxford, and as a management accountant for Iron Maiden.
For Paul’s publications, visit his profile on York’s Research Portal.
Research
Overview
Paul’s current Leverhulme-funded project is entitled ‘Romanticism and the Cost of Living’. The project investigates how literary writers in Romantic-period Britain (c.1780–1830) understood ‘the cost of living’ to encompass both financial challenges and philosophical questions. It examines the works and finances of several literary writers (including Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Thomas De Quincey) to reveal how their experiences of penury and debt shape their novels, poems, and essays. Combining archival research with scholarship in English studies and economic history, the project analyses each writers’ financial manuscripts (from ledger books to letters discussing money) to reveal their connections to the monetary ideas in their literary works. It also considers how these works converse with economic debates in contemporaneous newspapers and periodicals.
The project argues that writers of the Romantic period were the first to respond to the cost of living – an idea emerging in Britain at this time – in ways that anticipate modern debates on the psychological impact of financialisation. It thus explores the financial and philosophical questions their work was forced to confront. Do intangible forms of money alter our understanding of value and worth? How does class and gender shape experiences of the cost of living? How is life itself impacted by the wider costs of living under changing economic conditions? Moving between literary texts and financial manuscripts, theory and life writing, the project aims to demonstrate how writers of the period articulate new moral and epistemic anxieties about Britain’s emerging financial economy.
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 surviving holograph manuscripts of the ‘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
Undergraduate
Paul has taught widely on the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before coming to York, he held several fixed-term college lectureships at the University of Oxford, where he taught papers and supervised dissertations for the BA (Hons) English Language and Literature programme.
He has also tutored for several years at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education, where he has designed and delivered 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).
External activities
Overview
Trusteeships: Paul currently serves as a charity trustee and the treasurer for The Charles Lamb Society, and recently undertook the same roles for the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (2022-25). He was also a member of the executive committee for the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), serving as the postgraduate and then early-career representative (2017-22).
Conferences: Paul has co-organised several academic conferences, most recently the international Shelley Conference (2024) and the bicentennial Shelley Conference (2022), each staged at Keats House, London. He has also co-organised conferences supporting postgraduate and early-career scholars, including Oxford’s English Graduate Conference (2017), and two BARS PG/ECR conferences: Romantic Exchanges (2018) and Romantic Futurities (2020). As the MCR Academic Representative at Lincoln College, Oxford, he organised the annual Lincoln Leads Seminar Series (2018).
Collaborations: Paul is the co-lead investigator on a new project entitled 'The Language of Debt' which explores the intellectual and cultural history of debt. He is also on the steering committee for the AHRC-funded project 'Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Industry and Literature, 1770–1830'.
