My 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. I am currently working on a monograph based on my doctoral research which will combine historical, literary, and social network analysis to reassess the contexts surrounding Principal Navigations. I have published articles in Cultural and Social History and Renaissance Studies on aspects of this work, such as Hakluyt’s religious views, the structure and social dynamics of the Levant Company, and printed circuits of translation within 16th century English travel texts. I have also curated two exhibitions on this research, the first in 2021 at the Middle Temple Library, and the second in 2023 at the Bodleian Library.
I am also beginning work on a research project focusing on the lives of mercantile women in early modern England. This project uses a combination of archival research, social network analysis, and literary analysis to examine who these women were, how their social networks functioned, and how their position in society was framed both in their own work and as a literary trope in the period.
At Exeter this year I am teaching Paper 1: Shakespeare, Paper 3: Literature in English 1550–1660, and Paper 4: Literature in English 1660-1760.
Twitter/Bluesky: @emilylsteve
I am a Stipendiary Lecturer in English at Exeter College in 2023-4, and a Lecturer in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature at the University of York. I was awarded my DPhil by Oxford in 2021 for a thesis which examined the early modern travel writer Richard Hakluyt's most famous work, Principal Navigations of the English Nation, within wider literary and social contexts. From 2018-22 I was a member of the TIDE (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c. 1550-1700) project, first as a Doctoral Researcher and then as a Postdoctoral Researcher. I am also an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and was elected a Council Member of the Hakluyt Society in 2022.
