Group members

Tamsin Badcoe

Tamsin’s research explores the intersection of poetic and devotional forms with early modern spatial and textual practices including those of cosmography, chorography, geography, and navigation; the literary representation of early modern environments, specifically coastlines, wetlands, and islands, and the ship at sea; and the popularity of poetry in print during the early modern period. Tamsin is a member of the Bristol Common Press management committee.

Mary Bateman

Mary specialises in manuscript and book history, with a focus on the role played by the physical book in premodern conversations surrounding national, regional, and local identities. She is also interested in how particular manuscript and book formats, such as the multi-text manuscript, shaped the reception, transmission, and adaptation of textual traditions across medieval and early modern Europe.

Jennifer Batt

Jennifer’s research focuses on poetry in print in the long eighteenth century; she is working on a study of the poetical cultures of newspapers and magazines. She is interested in textual editing, and is currently editing Aphra Behn’s ‘Lycidus’. She is also interested in the history and practice of printing, and is the co-founder and co-director of Bristol Common Press.

Ian Calvert

Ian works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, and his research interests include Dryden and Pope; epic poetry; translation; classical reception; allusion and intertextuality; and textual editing. He is currently working on an edition of Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer for Oxford University Press.

Natalie Ferris

Natalie's research explores literature and visual cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with interests ranging from modernist legacies, contemporary artists' books, histories of typography and graphic design, conceptual bookworks, abstraction and illegibility, new media, critical practice as emerging from art practice. She was an assistant editor at Enitharmon Press, and is now a member of the Bristol Common Press management committee.

Timothy Gao

Tim Gao’s research explores the history and culture of virtual and immersive experiences in the nineteenth century, as well as digital editions or adaptations of nineteenth-century fiction. More broadly, he is interested in intersections between literature and video or analogue gaming.

Cathy Hume

Cathy is currently editing an anthology of ten biblical poems from ten manuscripts for the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. She is interested in reading and manuscript cultures, including investigating cognitive approaches to reading, and exploring the boundaries between reading aloud and dramatic performance.

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Rowena works on women’s writing and gender studies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special interest in archives, feminist recovery, editing, and unfinished texts. She is the author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century (Cornell UP, 2022). She recovered and edited Rukeyser's lost Spanish Civil War novel, Savage Coast (Feminist Press, 2013) and co-edited the volume The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell UP, 2023).

Doseline Kiguru

Doseline works on postcolonial print and digital cultures focusing on African literary and cultural production mechanisms. She engages with both the text and the literary networks within which the text circulates such as publishing and prize industries, book fairs and festivals, literary magazines and writers’ organisations, among others.

Madhu Krishnan

Madhu’s current work involves an exploration of contemporary print and digital cultures on the African continent in the context of social production and self-determination. She is particularly interested in the role of small magazines, newspapers and independent publishers; the role of circulation and form in the constitution of publics with varying levels of visibility; and questions of infrastructure and labour.

Samantha Matthews

Samantha researches Romantic and Victorian literary, visual, and material cultures, particularly non-canonical poetry and literary afterlives. She is an international expert on nineteenth-century albums, album poetry, confession books and relations between manuscript and print. She is currently working on a scholarly edition of Charles Lamb’s poetry.

John McTague

John works on Restoration and early eighteenth-century literary, political, and news cultures, hoxes and conspiracies, and the history of historiography (particularly forms of historical writing outside of the neo-classical mode i.e. pamphlets, broadsides, periodicals, newsletters). He pursues interests in history of the book and print cultures via desk-based and practice-led research. John is co-founder and co-director of Bristol Common Press.

Tara Puri

Tara works on Victorian women’s magazines as well as women’s magazines in late colonial India. She is interested in the publication histories of these periodicals as well as their editorial strategies, and more broadly thinking about how these seemingly more fleeting and less serious publications are part of women’s literary history. Tara is a member of the Bristol Common Press management committee.

Ad Putter

Ad has worked on manuscripts and print, and has a current focus on Caxton. He is interested in editing, and his latest book (with Shannon McSheffrey) on the Dutch Hatmakers of Late Medieval and Tudor London contains an edition of a bilingual Dutch-English guild book; a new edition of medieval love letters is also forthcoming. He directs the EU Horizon MSCA network, REBPAF: Re-mediating the early book, pasts and futures.

Matthew Steggle

Matthew works on sixteenth- and seventeenth- century English literature with a particular focus on drama and theatre history (especially Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and Caroline drama). He is also interested in scholarly editing; “historical phenomenology”; and digital humanities. He is co-general editor of The Oxford Works of John Marston and co-editor of the Lost Plays Database, http://www.lostplays.org.

Leah Tether

Leah is a scholar of medieval French and English literature, Arthurian romance, book and library history and publishing studies. She is the editor of various collections and handbooks on these topics, and the author of four monographs including, most recently, The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Hidden Secrets of a Medieval Fragment (ARC Humanities Press, 2021). Her current research project 'Unpublished' looks at the conditions governing why certain medieval texts that were widely transmitted in manuscript were not selected for print in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Sebastiaan Verweij

Sebastiaan’s research interests are in late-medieval and early modern literature and 'the history of the book'; Scottish literature; the digital and spatial humanities, and the works of John Donne. He is especially busy with two current projects: the ‘Literatures of Older Scotland Database (LOSD)’ (with Steven Reid and Sìm Innes); and a new book project, ‘Place and Poetry in Pre-Modern Scotland’.