“What Are You Reading?”: Dr. Carly Stevenson
The Communications Fellows are excited to continue the K-SAA Blog’s “What Are You Reading?” series! Started by the 2019 Comms Team, this series aims to spotlight the research of our community members and encourage conversation around recent publications in the field. Please reach out to us if you have someone you would like to see interviewed (including yourself)!
Dr. Carly Stevenson is an early career researcher and writer. She recently graduated from the University of Sheffield with a PhD in English Literature. Her thesis, titled John Keats and the Gothic Imagination, explored Keats’s sensory approach to the Gothic in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems (1820). Carly runs the Instagram account @keatsletters.
What new studies of Romantic-era literature are you reading right now?
I recently started reading John Keats and the Perils of Posterity by Nicholas Roe (OUP, 2025), which is about Keats’s posthumous rise to fame. Today, Keats’s place in the Western literary canon is so secure and uncontested, one would be forgiven for thinking this has always been the case. Roe reminds us that Keats’s afterlife is just as complicated as his earthly life.
Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?
Yes, absolutely. As a Gothicist, I’m interested in the ways in which Keats haunted the nineteenth-century literary imagination, so it’s useful to have a thorough contextual knowledge of how his public image evolved in the first few decades after his death.
What books are in your 'to read' pile right now? (Any period or genre!)
Two academic titles I’m looking forward to reading are: Andrew Bennett’s Reading Keats’s Letters (CUP, 2026), which is the first full-length critical study of John Keats’s private correspondence, and Gothic dreams and nightmares edited by Carol Davidson (MUP, 2026).
Night Babies by Lucie McKnight Hardy (2026) is at the top of my fiction ‘to read’ list. I loved her previous books, Water Shall Refuse Them (2019) and Dead Relatives (2021).
Which book(s) do you most frequently recommend to those starting out in Romantic-era research? Why?
The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism is a great place to start, as it offers a pretty comprehensive overview of the movement and its major writers. It’s accessible and most university libraries will have at least one copy. I’d also recommend Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (2021) to anyone starting out in Keats studies. Again, it’s very accessible and easy to get hold of in any good bookshop.
Have there been any articles or publications recently you’d like to draw our attention to?
Codex Poetics and the Politics of Romantic Reading by Emily Wing Rohrbach is scheduled for publication in September with Cambridge University Press. I’m intrigued by the description on the CUP website, which states: ‘Rohrbach puts conventionally ‘Romantic’ authors, such as Keats and Landon, in conversation with early Black Atlantic authors from the perspective of book history for the first time’.
When you are taking a break from research, what genre or authors do you like to check out?
I tend to gravitate towards horror and fantasy. My favourite author is Shirley Jackson, so I’m always on the lookout for writing that has a similar vibe to We Have Always Lived in the Castle or Hangsaman (her best novels, in my opinion). My ideal book would have the following tropes: an old, decaying house that may or may not be haunted, a secret that refuses to remain buried, a forest/woodland setting, and an unreliable narrator.
