My project aims to follow people through the places they visited and recorded, creating not only a thesis but also a database that will look into wider implications for early modern London's social and spatial division. Above all, I hope to uncover contemporaries’ understandings and experiences of the city space, identify personal/social networks of particular places and consider their likely evolution over time. In order to facilitate the analysis and make findings interactive, it is envisaged to map these places – a tool to highlight general connections between places as well as the way individual sites might stand out. As visualising is becoming more common among spatial historians, I believe that GIS would provide a useful method to see how people's mobility changed over time.

My main interest is early modern British history, spatial history, and the use of digital humanities in historical research. Apart from this, I'm really interested in the life of Elizabethans, spy networks, and playwrights, especially Kit Marlowe. My MA thesis looked in detail at the place where Marlowe was murdered to explore the issues with the common interpretation of his death. The methodology I used for this research and the possibilities that places might open for historical research made me really interested in spatial history in general, so I spent a year at the University of Padua exploring historical mobility and the use of data visualisation and HGIS techniques. 

Professor Naomi Tadmor

Professor Ian Gregory