Staff Profiles
I am interested in humour, print culture and religio-political division during the early modern period. My recent book Ephemeral Print Culture in Early Modern England: Sociability, Politics and Collecting (Boydell & Brewer, 2021) has explored some of these issues, using collections of ephemera to understand the reading habits, publishing strategies and thought processes common to print culture during the long eighteenth century.
Before joining Newcastle, I held fellowships at Queen’s University Belfast and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. In October 2019, I started a British Academy post-doctoral fellowship here with a research project titled ‘Humour in Early Modern Print Culture’.
The history of humour reveals the unstated assumptions of past societies and improves our understanding of political and religious contestation. My project approaches the topic by combining analysis of macro-trends in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print culture with case studies of readers and collectors. It will analyse the content of both jestbooks (compilations of jokes) and ballads. This will build up a picture of which themes, social groups and behaviours were popular enough with consumers to be commonly recycled, and which fell out of favour as cultural attitudes changed over time. These trends will be used to analyse the content of manuscript commonplace books and collections of print, exploring the way readers responded to and appropriated satire, stereotypes and humour for their own social and political ends.
I am also interested in making historical board games in order to create engaging teaching and public history activities. As part of a Creative Economy Engagement Fellowship I have gained experience developing and show-casing games based on my research: one on the Popish Plot, another on the Royal Society. I will apply this experience to the dissemination of my humour project in the near future.
- Somers T. Tradesmen in Virtuoso Culture: “Honest” John Bagford and his collecting network, 1686-1716. Huntington Library Quarterly 2018, 81(3), 359-386.
- Somers T. The “Impartiality” of Narcissus Luttrell’s Reading Practices and Historical Writing, 1679-1710. The Historical Journal 2018, 62(4), 921-941.
- Somers T. Ephemeral Print Culture in Early Modern England: Sociability, Politics and Collecting. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
- Somers T. Jesting culture and religious politics in seventeenth-century England. Historical Research 2022, January. In Press.
- Somers Tim. Micrography in Later Stuart Britain: curious spectacles and political emblems. In: Rosamond Oates & Jessica Purdy, ed. Communities of Print: Readers and their Books in Early Modern Europe. Brill, 2020. Submitted.