Office: G.12, 3-5 Woodland Rd

Phone: +44 (0)117 928 9850

Email: tamsin.badcoe@bristol.ac.uk

Before coming to Bristol I was a Postdoctoral Lecturing Fellow at the University of East Anglia and a Research Associate at the University of Geneva. I received my PhD from the University of York, where I also taught from 2007 to 2010.

Research Interests

My first book, Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space (2019), was published by Manchester University Press and won the 2020 University English Book Prize. This book is interested in the representation and making of location and environment in early modern imaginative and instructive literature and seeks to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and complexity played in early modern spatial and textual practices, including those of cosmography, chorography, geography, and navigation. In particular, it offers a series of encounters with the literary environments found in Edmund Spenser’s work, including coastlines, wetlands, and islands, with a focus on his epic allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene. These engagements ground readings that serve to theorise the role of spatial figuration in the representation of interpretive difficulty and the limits of knowledge in the poem.

My current book project, Maritime Passion in Early Modern Literature and Culture, concerns the relationship between maritime devotional practice and imaginative literature during the early modern period and investigates the particular temper of early modern maritime humours to reveal the coping mechanisms of those choosing an existence suspended between life and death. Sea travel was both an everyday activity in the early modern period and an endeavour that had the capacity to move the body and the mind of the traveller through uncertain and occasionally extreme states, which demanded a complex combination of devotional, cognitive, and practical responses in order to be navigated successfully. My study focuses on the language and expression of passion in maritime literary and devotional texts, and emphasises how this can serve as an analytical category for considering interactions between mind, body, and world. 

I have also published on the writings of William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, and Richard Carew, and on the poetics of earthquakes and early modern navigational practices.

Postgraduate Supervision

I have supervised projects on William Shakespeare, early modern city comedy, and early modern print culture, and am currently supervising projects on Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth I and poetry, early modern clowning, horses in early modern London, grief and materiality in early modern drama, and the literary and visual worldmaking of J.R.R. Tolkien. I would be happy to supervise doctoral work with a focus on the early modern period and/or which engages with questions concerning the relationship between literature and space, geography, cognition, materiality, visual culture, and/or the environment.

Teaching

I currently teach on the following units:

Approaches to Poetry (Y1)

Literature 1550-1740 (Y1)

Shakespeare (Y2)

Utopian Literature (Y2)

Writing for Art (Y3)

MA in English Literature (Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Pathway and Literature and the Environment Pathway)

Introduction to Literary Research

Intertextual Shakespeare

Renaissance Literature: Texts and Contexts

Literature and the Environment: Diverse Perspectives

Writing in the Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Uranium