I am interested in how people wrote about and encountered their world in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. My research to date has primarily focused on travel writing, taking this definition broadly to consider diaries, letters and narratives as well as drama, visual imagery and material culture. As well as historical and literary modes of analysis I have also used social network analysis in my research and have an interest in Digital Humanities methodologies and the development of the field.
I have published articles which draw from this research on a range of topics including the religious views of early modern travel writers, the structure and social dynamics of English merchants in the Levant, and the autobiography of Rose Lok, a merchant's daughter. My doctoral thesis was on Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; 1598-1600), examining how the text functions as a textual network and how it reflected and created contemporary interests in travel and colonisation, and I am currently working on a monograph based on this research. I am also working on a monograph for the Cambridge Elements series which will examine the role of indigenous language lists in early modern travel texts.
I was previously a member of the TIDE (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c, 1550-1700) project based at University of Liverpool and from 2019, the University of Oxford. As a member of the project I contributed to our publications and external collaborations and I have since continued this work: in 2021 I co-curated an exhibition at the Middle Temple Library in London, and in 2023 another exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Along with Lauren Working at the University of York, I co-authored a chapter drawing from this research titled Between Ship and Library: Global Knowledge and Spaces of Exchange at the Middle Temple, 1586–1636, recently published in Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Writing Communities (Palgrave, 2025).
I am also beginning work on a research project focusing on the lives of mercantile women in early modern England. This project uses a combination of archival research, social network analysis, and literary analysis to examine who these women were, how their social networks functioned, and how their position in society was framed both in their own work and as a literary trope in the period.
I have previously taught for Exeter College, the University of Reading, the University of York, and Newcastle University. I have supervised undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations at these institutions on a wide range of topics including examining The Canterbury Tales through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir's work; the significance of race in early modern poetry; cannibalism and female sexuality in early modern revenge tragedies, and the popularity and development of 'cozy crime' as a genre.
Twitter/Bluesky: @emilylsteve
Previous roles include:
- Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, Newcastle University
- Lecturer in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, University of York
- Stipendiary Lecturer, Exeter College, University of Oxford
- Associate Lecturer, University of Reading
- Doctoral/Postdoctoral Researcher, TIDE project, University of Liverpool/University of Oxford
I am an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, was elected a Council Member of the Hakluyt Society in 2022, and was awarded Fellowship of Advance HE in 2025.
