Tom Roberts

I am a DPhil candidate on the ERC-TIDE Project (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c.1550-1700). My research looks at England’s interaction with the commedia dell’arte during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and how the form manifested in the cultural imagination of early modern London when the surviving evidence suggests limited contact. I also work on human migration to sixteenth-century London and the small population of Italian merchants, scholars, and liberal artisans residing in the City’s eastern wards. I am particularly interested in how these migrants navigated their new environment, importing certain cultural and spatial practices and remodelling them to the specifications of the material city. My wider research interests include the clowning on the English stage, print culture, and the works of Thomas Nashe.