Stephen Burley, BA (UCL) MPhil (Oxford) PhD (London)

Dr Williams's Centre Associate

Stephen Burley’s research focuses on the literary and religious culture of the period 1760-1830, with a particular interest in non-fictional prose writing. He has worked extensively on the culture of late eighteenth-century Unitarianism. His doctoral research examined Hazlitt’s intellectual development within rational dissenting networks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His 2011 thesis, entitled ‘Hazlitt the Dissenter: Religion, Philosophy, and Politics, 1766-1816’, will form the basis of his first book.

He is the editor of The Charles Lamb Bulletin and has published widely on writers including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, Godwin, Walter Scott, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is one of a team of special subject editors working on a major interdisciplinary project to produce a multi-volume edition of Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary (the Crabb Robinson Project). He has recently completed work on an extensive new online resource for Blackwell-Wiley as a companion to the fourth edition of Duncan Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology.

His online publications on the Centre for Dissenting Studies website are A Bibliography of the Writings of William Hazlitt (1737-1820) and New College, Hackney (1786-96): A Selection of Printed and Archival Sources. He is a contributor to the forthcoming History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860.

His articles and reviews include :

‘First Acquaintances: Godwin, Hazlitt, and the Trials of Authorship’, The Bodleian Library Record, 21 (2011), 66-72
Review essay on Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford: OUP, 2008), Romanticism, 17 (2011), 126-131
‘The Lost Polemics of William Hazlitt (1737-1820)’, Review of English Studies, 61 (2010), 259-75
‘‘In this intolerance I glory’: William Hazlitt (1737-1820) and the Dissenting Periodical’, The Hazlitt Review, 3 (2010), 9-23
Articles on Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft in Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism, edited by Andrew Maunder (New York, 2010)
‘Hazlitt’s Preface to Political Essays and Walter Scott’s Old Mortality’, Notes and Queries, 55.4 (2008), 437-439
‘Lamb’s First Play: An Editorial Enigma’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, 142 (2008), 48-60
‘John Stoddart’s Remarks and the Snowdon Episode in Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805)’, Notes and Queries, 51.2 (2004), 148-9
‘Hazlitt and John Stoddart: Brothers-in-law or Brothers at War?’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 122 (2003), 52-63
‘The Silenced Voice: Curses and Law in Coleridge’s Poetry’, The Coleridge Bulletin, 20 (2002), 54-62

In 2003 his essay ‘Shelley, The United Irishmen and The Illuminati’ won first prize in the annual Keats-Shelley Memorial Association competition and was published in the Keats-Shelley Journal, 17 (2003), 18-26.