College: Corpus Christi College
Email: sf683@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor Virginia Cox
Research Topic: Telling the truth in sixteenth-century global travel writing
About
Sam is in the second year of an AHRC-funded PhD in Italian. He has a BA in German and Italian (Bristol, 2019) and an MPhil in European Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2021). Outside his academic work, he enjoys writing about art and contemporary visual culture (Apollo, Lampoon Italy, WWD). Sam loves music and has worked as a studio producer at the online broadcasters Berlin Community Radio and Noods Radio (Bristol).
During a year out between his BA and his MPhil, Sam worked with the author and broadcaster John Kampfner on the Guardian Book of the Year and Sunday Times Bestseller Why the Germans Do It Better (Atlantic, 2020). During his Erasmus+ year abroad, he studied at the Humboldt in Berlin and worked in Milan. Sam grew up in London and has dual German and British citizenship.
Research
Sam is researching early modern global travel writing. For him, this topic is a means to investigate questions of truth, falsity and persuasion during this period. Contemporaneous critics of the two sixteenth-century travel accounts that he is researching accused each author of fraud, challenging their reports of having crossed the Atlantic or ventured beyond India into Southeast Asia. He is reading these texts into a history of travel literature where fantasy and make-believe are constantly at play – from the Odyssey to Mandeville and Marco Polo and into the sixteenth century. This frames a study of the strategies that travel writers developed to advance the authority, reliability and authenticity of their works, and the approaches that readers adopted to navigate these.
Sam’s MPhil dissertation looked at fifteenth-century Italian exiles’ practices of letter-writing. He focused on the themes of family and home in a decades-long correspondence between the Florentine patrician woman Alessandra Strozzi and her exiled sons.
Scholarships/Prizes
AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Studentship (2021-2024)
Bristol School of Modern Languages Prize (2019)
