Tom Roberts

My research looks at England’s interaction with the Italian 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 spatial practices and remodelling them to the specifications of the material city.