Kate E. Tunstall, M.A. (B.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Cambridge)
Professor of French, Chevalière dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques
Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones Fellow in Modern Languages, Worcester College
Research
My research expertise is in the literary history of the French eighteenth century, in particular the works of the philosophe, Diderot. I'm interested in literary materiality, the act of publication, practices of anonymity and pseudonymity, querelles, and in questions of contextualisation. I am currently working on a project called 'Julie de Lespinasse and her Manuscript Miscellany', while also trying to finish a material history of Diderot's Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre. For research blogposts, see my Carnet18.
I am currently the General Editor of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I'm also the author of Blindness and Enlightenment (2011), the editor of Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment (2012), and the co-editor of a number of collections of essays, including Naming, Renaming, and Un-Naming in Early Modern Europe (2013) and Women and Quarrels in Early Modern France (2022). I was the first Academic Programme Director for the Voltaire Foundation's Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment, and co-steered the ANR-funded research collective, AGON. La dispute: cas, controverses et querelles à l'âge classique (Oxford-Paris-IV). I'm also a member of a number of international research groups, including the Groupe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire de l'Histoire du Littéraire (EHESS-Paris III).
Translation
Translation is an important part of my academic practice. I have translated or co-translated three works by Diderot: Letter on the Blind, Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown (with Katie Scott), and Rameau's Nephew (with Caroline Warman). The latter, a free-access, multi-media edition, won the 2015 British Society for 18thc Studies Prize for digital resources. I have also translated the short story by Daudet, Mr Segwin's Goat (in Littéraire).
Access to Higher Education
I have a longstanding commitment to and strong track record in widening participation in higher education. I was myself educated at a Comprehensive School in South London and went from there to Cambridge, where I did a B.A. in French and German, including a year at the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier. I did a Ph.D in French at Cambridge, and held a Kennedy Fellowship at Harvard from 1995-96. I am always delighted to receive UCAS applications from sixth-formers from non-selective state schools and colleges. Read an interview with me about Admissions (scroll down to page 10), 'What Tutors Want', in the Worcester Alternative Prospectus. And read what Worcester College as a whole has more recently been doing to Make Access Fair and Keep Access Fair.
Undergraduate Teaching
I teach undergraduates in lectures, seminars and tutorials, in both English and French, introducing them to a wide variety of texts and topics in French literature and culture from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. I also teach translation into English.
Graduate Teaching (Masters and Doctorate)
I welcome applications from students wishing to study any aspect of French eighteenth-century writing.
Other
UCU member. For coverage of the 2017 pensions dispute, see here.
Statement on the risks posed to universities by the PREVENT duty, see here.
Director and Treasurer, Oxford Amnesty Lectures.
Radio: Series on Diderot (with Caroline Warman) for Radio 3 'The Essay'.
Member: Campaign for the Public University. For an intervention in the 2011 debate about higher education, see here.
Publications (Books, Editions, Translations)
Women and Querelles in Early Modern France, co-edited with Helena Taylor, special issue of Romanic Review, 112: 3 (2022).
Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, ed. Marian Hobson, co-translated with Caroline Warman, music directed by Pascal Duc (Cambridge, Open Book Publishers, 2014; 2nd edition 2016). Review: "it's a scholarly edition and a very highbrow gossip magazine rolled into one! And, dulcis in fundo, the new translation is a tour de force of grace and intuition, a profoundly intelligent rendition of the many nuances of Diderot's language. Miraculously, it manages to be both contemporary and absolutely dix-huitième. A fantastic teaching tool, one that brings the highest scholarship down to earth."
Naming, Un-Naming, and Re-Naming in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe, a special double issue of Romance Studies, co-edited with Wilda Anderson, 31.3-4 (2013).
Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures (New York and London: Continuum, 2012).
Blindness and Enlightenment. An Essay (New York and London: Continuum, 2011). Reviewed in London Review of Books; and on H-Net: 'Her writing succeeds in uniting serious scholarship of high quality with the traditions of an almost extinct vein of learned and lightly satiric British wit. [...] It deserves a place in the library of every person at all interested in Enlightenment thought and its central ideas.'
Diderot and Rousseau: Networks of Enlightenment. Collected Essays by Marian Hobson, co-edited and co-translated with Caroline Warman, (SVEC 2011:4). See here and here for reviews.
Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?, co-edited with Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert and Jean Salem (SVEC 2006:12).
Displacement, Asylum, Migration: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2004 (OUP, 2006).
Publications (Articles, Chapters)
'Diderot's 'Pensées diverses philosophiques': a manuscript among Mme Du Deffand's papers' (in preparation); see also this blog post.
'Diderot in the Encyclopédie nouvelle’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, special issue on Pierre Leroux et Jean Reynaud’s Encyclopédie nouvelle (forthcoming 2024).
'The Knife and the Pen: the attentat of 1757', in Turmoil/Dans La Tourmente: Instability and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Siofra Pierse and Emma Dunne, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 44-62.
'Conversations with the Blind, or 'Aren't You Surprised I can Speak?'', in A Cultural History of Disability: The Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Chris Gabbard and Susannah Mintz (Bloomsbury, 2019).
'La fabrique du Diderot-philosophe, 1765-1782', in A l'enseigne du GRIHL: quelques parcours dans l'histoire du littéraire (2018).
‘Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Thought’, in The Cambridge History of French Thought, ed. Michael Moriarty and Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
‘Des pseudonymes, des faux, et d’autres fabrications: disputes autour du nom d’auteur (1688-1765)’, in Querelles et création à l'époque moderne, ed. Jeanne-Marie Hostiou et Alexis Tadié (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019).
'Diderot-Voltaire: la coédition comme coalition', French Studies Bulletin, 38.143 (2017), 24-30.
'Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, and the Figure of the Philosophe in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in A History of Modern French Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 371-92.
'Ne nous engageons point dans des querelles': un projet de guerre perpétuelle?', Revue de Synthèse, tome 137, 6e série, 3-4 (2016), 345-372.
Diderot's Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown, co-translated with Katie Scott, Oxford Art Journal, 39.2 (2016), 175-184.
'Le Neveu de Rameau, règne des pagodes et des magots', Diderot Studies, 35 (2015 [2017]), 53-70.
'A Case in Transit: Reading Diderot (reading Montaigne) reading Augustine', in Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean, ed. Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar, and Wes Williams (Oxford: Legenda, 2016), pp. 19-35.
'The Early Modern Embodied Mind and the Entomological Imaginary' in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives, eds. Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), pp. 202-229.
'Pseudonyms, Ghosts, and Vampires in the Republic of Letters: Adrien Baillet’s Auteurs déguisez (1690)", in Romance Studies 31. 3–4 (2013), 200–211.
''You're either anonymous or you're not!' Variations on Anonymity in Modern and Early Modern Culture', in MLN (2011), 671-688.
'Eyes Wide Shut: Le Rêve de d'Alembert', in New Essays on Diderot, ed. James Fowler (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), pp. 141-157.
‘Philosophy, Ethics and the Work of Fiction’, ed. Alexis Tadié and Richard Scholar, Fiction and the Frontiers of Knowledge in Europe, 1500–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 107–21.
'Sexe, mensonges et colonies: les discours de l'amour dans le Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville', Littératures classiques 69 (2009), 17-34.
‘L’aveugle qui suit l’aveugle qui suit l’aveugle: la philosophie intertextuelle de la Lettre sur les aveugles’ in Marion Chottin (ed.), L’Aveugle et le philosophe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2009), pp. 63–81.
‘Pré-histoire d’un emblème des Lumières: l’aveugle-né de Montaigne à Diderot’, in Isabelle Moreau (ed.), Les Lumières en mouvement: la circulation des idées au XVIIIe siècle (Lyon: ENS, 2009), pp. 173–97.
'Portraits and Afterlives: Diderot and Montaigne', in Pre-Histories and Afterlives: Studies in Critical Method for Terence Cave, ed. Anna Holland and Richard Scholar (Legenda, 2008), pp. 95-105.
‘The Judgement of Experience: Reading and Seeing in Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles’ in French Studies, 62.4 (2008), 404–16.
'Diderot, Chardin et la matière sensible', Dix-Huitième Siècle, 39 (2007), 577-593.
'Paradoxe sur le portrait : Auto-portrait de Diderot en Montaigne', Diderot Studies, 30 (2007), 197-210.
‘‘Des circonstances assez peu philosophiques’: Diderot’s‘aveugle-né du Puiseaux’’ in French Studies Bulletin, 27.99 (2006), 33–6.
'Le récit est un voile: esthétique et Lumières', in Qu'est-ce que les lumières?, ed. Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert, Jean Salem, and Kate E. Tunstall (SVEC, 2006:12), 143-154.
'Text, Image, Intertext: Diderot, Chardin, Pliny', SVEC, (2006:12), 345-357.
'Racine in 1769 and 1910, or Racine à l'usage de ceux qui voient', SVEC, (2006:08), pp. 190-205.
''Crânement beau tout de même': Still life and Le Ventre de Paris', French Studies, LVIII, no. 2 (2004), 177-187.
'Word meets Image: Racine and silent film', Word and Image, 19.4 (2003), 247-260.
'Diderot's 'promenade Vernet' or the salon as landscape garden', French Studies, LV, no. 3 (2001), 339-49.
'Courbet, Advertising and Femininity', French Cultural Studies, 12:1, No. 34 (2001), 109-14.
'Chardin's Games', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (2000:08), pp. 131–41.