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.

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, place and regionalism and 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'.