United Kingdom
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), focusing on the ways that literary writers confronted the cost of living. He tutors at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education, and serves as a trustee and treasurer for The Charles Lamb Society. Before completing an MSt and DPhil at Oxford, he worked for several years as a management accountant for Iron Maiden.
Design and deliver new undergraduate courses for the Department’s accredited literature programme. Each course is composed of 10 two-hour classes, combining taught material and orchestrated discussion. Assessment involves the marking and grading of formative and summative essays, and all related administration. • Thomas Hardy: His Life and Work (2024) • Identity in the Victorian Short Story (2024) • British Romanticism and the Natural World (2023) • The Nineteenth-Century Political Novel (2021) • Enlightenment to Romanticism (2020)
• Appointed by College Fellows to provide welfare and disciplinary services (Warden 2017-19). • Liaise closely with SCR, MCR and JCR in relation to College governance and event management. • Completed 30-hour Junior Dean training course, and 1-day First Aid and Fire Safety workshops.
Dissertation Supervision (Trinity 2020 - Hilary 2022) • Independently supervising two undergraduate dissertations (8 hours of one-on-one supervisions). • Set reading lists, written assignments, deadlines, and supervising all aspects of composition. • Dissertation topics: Mary Shelley and her Circle; John Thelwall and retirement/isolation.
My doctoral thesis examined the work of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) through the disciplinary lens of economic philosophy. The thesis contends that Shelley’s views on economic concepts such as value, debt, and growth are conditioned by his broader metaphysics and epistemology. The relationship between these fields of thought was widely debated during the Romantic period. Shelley’s major contribution was the idea that the material conditions of Britain might be directly shaped by the manner in which economic phenomena was theorised and articulated. The thesis therefore examined the economic ideas in Shelley’s essays, notebooks, and letters in relation to key philosophical ideas in his major poems to reveal neglected connections between these two aspects of his work.