[1] His doctoral thesis at the University of Hull was on 'The Seventeenth-century Influence on the Early Religious and Political Thought of S. T. Coleridge, 1790-1805'.
Kitson has authored and edited many books and articles on Romantic period literature, and the global contexts of romantic writing, including theories of race, slavery, and empire.
Recently, he has been working extensively on Sino British cultural relations.
His publications include the important Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Relations 1760--1840, (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and the multi-volume edition Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period (Pickering & Chatto, 1998), which provided modern readers with a substantial body of eighteenth-century writings about race and slavery.
He has received numerous research awards, including awards from the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the Carnegie Trust.
Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-British Cultural Relations.
(Edited with Brycchan Carey) Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Period: Bodies of Knowledge.
(Edited with Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee) Placing and Displacing Romanticism.
(Edited with Debbie Lee) Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830.
(Edited with Tim Fulford)[2] Coleridge, Keats and Shelley: New Macmillan Casebook.
Coleridge and the Armoury of the Human Mind: Essays on His Prose Writings.