Gerard McKeever

Lecturer in Scottish Literature

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 2.48
50 George Square

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9LH

Availability

  • Office hours for Semester 1, 2023-24: Thursdays, 15.00-16.00. Please feel free to drop in without an appointment during this office hour, or email me if you're unable to make this time to arrange an alternative appointment.

Biography

Background

Gerard McKeever is Lecturer in Scottish Literature. He completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Glasgow, before spending two years as Research Assistant on the Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns (AHRC). He was then a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Glasgow between 2017 and 2020, working on a project titled 'Regional Romanticism: Dumfriesshire and Galloway, 1770–1830'. Subsequently, he was Research Fellow for two years on the AHRC-funded 'Books and Borrowing 1750–1830' project at the University of Stirling. He joined the University of Edinburgh in 2022.

Qualifications

AHRC-funded PhD

MPhil by Research

MA (Hons)

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Responsibilities & affiliations

Departmental Liaison for the History of the Book

Bursaries Officer, British Association for Romantic Studies

Reviews Editor, Scottish Literary Review

Treasurer, Universities Committee for Scottish Literature

Steering Committee, John Galt Society

Undergraduate teaching

  • English Literature 1
  • Haunted Imaginations: Scotland and the Supernatural
  • Mystery and Horror
  • Romanticism: Themes, Genres and Contexts
  • Scottish Literature 2
  • Dissertation Supervision

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Gerard is open to supervising postgraduate research that complements any of his research interests.

Current PhD students supervised

Gerard is currently supervising doctoral research on early nineteenth-century Scottish novels, theories of 'improvement' and the history of reading.

Research summary

Gerard's research is concerned with Scottish and British literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Much of his recent work has addressed matters of space and place, regionalism and Romanticism. He is currently finishing a book for Palgrave Macmillan about the literary geography of southwest Scotland in a local, national and transnational context.

He has a longstanding interest in ideas of progress as 'improvement' and is the author of Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786–1831 (EUP, 2020), which is published in the 'Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism' series and won the BARS First Book Prize 2021.

Gerard is active in the fields of book history and library history through a large-scale study of borrowing records from Scottish libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

He is also currently editing the autobiographical writings of John Galt for the 'Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt'.

Affiliated research centres

View all 32 publications on Research Explorer

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