Gerard McKeever
Lecturer in Modern Scottish Literature
Contact details
Address
- Street
-
Room 2.48
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LH
Availability
I am on research leave in semester 1 of the 25/26 academic year and will not be holding a regular drop-in hour.
Background
Gerard McKeever is Lecturer in Modern 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) team, which was awarded the Queens Anniversary Prize in 2023. 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 at the University of Stirling on the AHRC-funded 'Books and Borrowing 1750–1830' project, which was awarded the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Digital Prize. 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
Co-Director, Edition (formerly the Centre for the History of the Book)
Fellow, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
Bursaries Officer, British Association for Romantic Studies
Reviews Editor, Scottish Literary Review
Committee Member, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society
Judge, David Laing Book Collecting Prize
Board Member, Association for Scottish Literary Studies
Treasurer, Universities Committee for Scottish Literature
Steering Committee, John Galt Society
Committee, Friends of Edinburgh University Library
Undergraduate teaching
- Contemporary Scottish Fiction
- Literary Geography, 1800–1840
- Haunted Imaginations: Scotland and the Supernatural
- Mystery and Horror
- 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 4 doctoral projects on the Signet Library; Walter Scott and detective fiction; Scotland and the supernatural; and literature and environmentalism.
He was the successful lead applicant for a SGSAH Collaborative Doctoral Award (c.£93,000) running 2025-2029).
Past PhD students supervised
Dr Cleo O'Callaghan Yeoman - 'Novel Reading and Self-Improvement in Scotland, c.1800-37' (PhD awarded without corrections, 2025).
Research summary
Gerard's research is concerned with Scottish and British literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Much of his recent work addresses matters of space, place and print culture. His hot-off-the-press monograph, Regional Romanticism: Literature and Southwest Scotland, c. 1770–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), is published in the 'Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print Series'.
He has a longstanding interest in ideas of progress as 'improvement'. His first monograph, Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786–1831 (EUP, 2020), 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 'Books and Borrowing 1750-1830' (AHRC), a large-scale study of borrowing records from Scottish libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which was awarded the BSECS Digital Prize 2025.
He is also currently editing the autobiographical writings of John Galt for the 'Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt'.
In the year 2025/26, Gerard is mentor for the BARS/BAVS Nineeteenth-Century Matters Fellowship (Dr Yasmin Akhter); and mentor for the IASH Daiches-Manning Fellowship (Dr Amy Wilcockson).
Affiliated research centres
In the press
See the listings at Gerard McKeever - Press/Media - University of Edinburgh Research Explorer
>In addition, press coverage of my research includes articles in The Scotsman (January 2022), The National (January 2022), The Daily Record (January 2022), Scottish Construction Now (January 2022), DNG24 (January 2022), D&G Standard (September 2025, January 2022, November 2021, March 2018), DGWGO (January 2022, November 2021), Annandale Observer (November 2021), Dumfries Courier (November 2021), Nithsdale Times (November 2021), Dumfries and Galloway Life Magazine (November 2021, May 2018, April 2018).