Dr Paul Stephens

I am an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Humanities Division) at Lincoln College, Oxford. My research explores the connections between literature and finance during the long eighteenth century. I recently completed an AHRC-funded DPhil in English on the economic thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley, supervised by Timothy Michael, and served as a Junior Dean at Lincoln College (2019-24). I have been awarded Visiting Fellowships at the Huntington Library, California (2020) and the University of Glasgow Library (2024), and have recently received a Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grant from the Keats-Shelley Association of America (2024). I am now preparing my first monograph, Shelley and the Economic Imagination, that connects the poet’s economic ideas and his epistemological theory of the creative imagination.

Textual Scholarship.  I am 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) and due to commence work on Volume V. I also provided 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 for Volume IV. I am currently editing Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) for Volume III: Works for Children (ed. Felicity James).

Teaching.  I have held recent College lectureships at Lincoln and Oriel, where I taught undergraduates FHS I Papers 5 and 6, and supervised students at Oriel and Trinity for FHS I Paper 7 Dissertations. I currently tutor at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education, where I have designed and delivered several undergraduate courses on Romantic-period and Victorian literature, and where I recently served as Programme Director for the Oxford-Duke Summer School at New College (2023).

Projects.  Alongside my own research, I am the co-lead investigator on a new project entitled 'The Language of Debt' which explores the intellectual and cultural history of debt. I am also on the steering committee of an AHRC-funded project 'Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Industry and Literature, 1770-1830' and a co-organiser of The Shelley Conference (2024), having co-organised the poet’s Bicentenary Conference (2022). I also serve as trustee and treasurer for both The Charles Lamb Society and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Publications (Selected): 

•  'Politics and Reform', Mary Shelley in Context, ed. Lisa Vargo (CUP). In Progress.

•  'Political Economy', Percy Shelley in Context, ed. Ross Wilson (2025). In Press.

•  'Review: Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy', The Charles and Mary Lamb Bulletin 2 (2024), 73-78.

•  'Queen Mab and the Origins of Economic Value', Romanticism 30:1 (2024), 68-80.

•  'Review: The Poet's Guide to Economics', The Charles Lamb Bulletin 178 (2023), 102-05.

•  'Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ethics of Debt', The Review of English Studies 71:298 (2020), 117-39.

•  'Review: Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary', The Keats-Shelley Review 33:1 (2019), 134-36.

•  'Coleridge and the National Debt', European Journal of English Studies 21:1 (2017), 26-42.