Paul Stephens

Paul Stephens is an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Humanities Division at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on the intersections between literature and finance in the long eighteenth century, particularly the economic thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Stephens holds a DPhil in English from Oxford, supervised by Timothy Michael, and has held roles as Junior Dean at Lincoln College (2019–24) and Programme Director for the Oxford-Duke Summer School (2023). He is preparing a monograph, Shelley and the Economic Imagination, and co-leads the project The Language of Debt.

Stephens has editorial roles with Oxford University Press, including work on The Letters of William Godwin and Collected Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. He teaches Romantic and Victorian literature at the Department for Continuing Education and has organized major conferences, including the Shelley Bicentenary Conference (2022). His awards include Visiting Fellowships at the Huntington Library and University of Glasgow Library, and a Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grant (2024).

His research projects explore interdisciplinary themes like debt’s intellectual history and industry-literature dialogues (1770–1830). He also serves as trustee and treasurer for The Charles Lamb Society and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.