I am a writer, editor, and scholar of eighteenth-century British literature. My first book, Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain, is forthcoming in April 2026 from Oxford University Press.
I am currently a research fellow in English Literature at the Università degli Studi di Sassari, Italy. I completed my PhD in English at Harvard and studied for my BA and MA at the University of Toronto.
I am editor of Transactions, the annual journal of the Johnson Society (Lichfield).
My email is leonardroy24@gmail.com
Please find below some of my published work and work in progress.
Work in progress
Literary Sardinia / Sardegna letteraria, digital project that maps the itineraries and literary record of British and Irish travellers in Sardinia.
A long-term archival project on the cultural history of eighteenth-century studies.
A state-of-the-field article on hostility and eighteenth-century British literature.
A chapter on ‘Periodicals and Journalism’ for the Oxford Handbook to Jane Austen.
An article on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Byron’s letters written in Italy.
An article on Byron, Venice, and anti-tourism.
An article on the English pasquin.
Some published and forthcoming work
Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026).
Six entries in London (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to the English Novel, 1660–1820 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
co-authored with L. Salis,'Inventing Tourism: Mary Davey, Charles Edwardes and British Travel Literature on Sardinia', in Rotondo, Devilla, and Bassu (eds), Il governo del patrimonio linguistico e culturale per lo sviluppo sostenibile delle destinazioni (Giappichelli, 2025).
'L’inventore del turismo in Sardegna', Il Post (26 June 2024).
'Boswell’s Self-hatred', Review of English Studies, 73 (2022), 919–33.
'Samuel Johnson and Good Hating', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44 (2021), 41–57.
'Clarissa in the Streets', The Rambling, 11 (2021).
Review of Knights and Morton (eds), The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain: Political and Religious Culture, 1500-1820 (Boydell Press, 2017), in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 32 (2019), 216–19.