Thomas Black

I am an AHRC (M3C) funded PhD researcher in early modern literature at the University of Nottingham. I began this research in 2016 after completing a masters degree, also at Nottingham, and my undergraduate studies at the University of Glasgow. Between my undergraduate and postgraduate studies I took two years out of academia to work (in the charity sector), get married and start a family.

My research focuses on the interaction of the different parts of Britain in the early modern period, and the development of cultural and national identities in response to the formation of the British state. This centres on intra-Scottish tensions between Gaels and Scots, and in Ireland on the changing dynamics of ethnicity and religious affiliation. I hope this research will help flesh out our understanding of the complex history of British identities, and in so doing inform our rather stilted contemporary debates on British identity and politics. More broadly I am interested in the politics of Renaissance Europe and Britain, particularly texts which examine utopian or republican models of society. Alongside this I continue to work on postcolonial identities in 20th century Caribbean writing, which informs and challenges my work on Britain as it began to assemble an empire.