Dr Paul Stephens
Dr Paul Stephens recently completed an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford, and now tutors undergraduate courses in English Literature at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education. His published research explores the relationship between literature and economics during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently preparing his first book, Shelley and the Economic Imagination, which examines the economic thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The book evolved from an AHRC-funded doctoral thesis completed at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 2022.
During his Visiting Research Fellowship, Paul will explore the correspondence and private library of economic historian James Bonar (1852-1941) held in the Bonar Collection. The collection includes over 500 holograph letters to George Findlay Shirras (1885-1955) that discuss contemporary economic debates and the theories of their peers. This research will contribute to a new project, ‘The Economic Imagination in Victorian Culture’, that investigates the emergence of ‘the economic imagination’ as a new idea in the economic and literary writings of the late nineteenth century. Bonar’s groundbreaking works of economic philosophy, including Philosophy and Political Economy (1893), explained how the study of economic matters is shaped by broader philosophical systems and ideas. The project hopes to show how Bonar’s work was instrumental in reaffirming the imagination as crucial to economic thought, and how the novelists, poets, and essayists of his age were thus equipped to engage with economic ideas imaginatively.
I am honoured to receive a Visiting Research Fellowship from the University of Glasgow, and grateful to the William Lind Foundation for its support. The Fellowship will enable me to explore James Bonar’s unpublished correspondence in the Library’s Bonar Collection. My interest in Bonar relates primarily to his contributions to the foundation of economic philosophy as a distinct branch of economics. Bonar’s timely return to the philosophical foundations of economic thought corresponded with the emergence of ‘the economic imagination’ as a new concept in late-nineteenth-century Britain, one emphasising the role of the imagination in economic understanding. Bonar was also an important editor, exemplified by his edition of the Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus, 1810-1823 (1887), but his own correspondence has received little attention. I hope to redress this oversight by transcribing key letters from the Collection to gain greater awareness of Bonar’s original contributions to economic thought. I am also looking forward to spending time in the wider research community at the University of Glasgow – Bonar’s alma mater – and enjoying the rich cultural life of the city.
