Dr Kate E. Tunstall

Kate E. Tunstall, M.A. (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Cambridge)
University Lecturer (CUF) in French, Fellow of Worcester College
Email:   kate.tunstall@worc.ox.ac.uk
Tel:   01865 278343

Research

My main research interests are in eighteenth-century and Enlightenment writing, Diderot in particular, and in the field of word and image relations. My recent book, Blindness and Enlightenment. An Essay (2011), explores figures of blind men in French writing, both literary and philosophical, from the mid sixteenth to the mid eighteenth centuries. It also contains new translations of Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles and La Mothe Le Vayer's 'Of a Man Born Blind'.

I have just finished editing a collection of essays on Human Rights and the Enlightenment, based on the 2010 Oxford Amnesty Lectures, called Self-Evident Truths? (2012).

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 eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, some of which I am more of an expert on than others. My main expertise is in the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. I also teach translation. The French team at Worcester has two other members, one teaching French language, the other French literature of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Graduate Teaching

I welcome applications from graduate students at Masters or D.Phil level, wishing to study any aspect of the French Enlightenment, Diderot, materialism, aesthetics, art criticism. See Masters in European Enlightenment. Download course poster here. I am currently supervising D.Phil. students working on Enlightenment conceptions of the body and the senses; Bayle's Dictonnaire philosophique et critique; and early modern lives of Ovid.

Background / Access to HE

I was educated at a Comprehensive School in South London and went from there to Cambridge, where I did a B.A. in French and German, followed by a Ph.D in French. I am always delighted to receive applications from sixth-formers from non-selective state schools and colleges.

Other

Director, Oxford Amnesty Lectures. Download publicity for 2010 Lecture Series here.
Radio: Series on Diderot (with Caroline Warman) for Radio 3 'The Essay'.
Member: Campaign for the Public University, Oxford University Campaign for Higher Education (OUCHE!). For an intervention in the debate about higher education, see here

Publications

I've divided them into three sections, 'I. Enlightenment and Early Modern, 'II. Modern' and 'III. Academic Activism'. Word and image relations is a field of study common to I and II.

I. Enlightenment and Early Modern

Book

Blindness and Enlightenment. An Essay. With New Translations of Diderot's 'Lettre sur les aveugles' and La Mothe Le Vayer's 'Of a Man Born Blind' (New York and London: Continuum, 2011). See here.

Articles

Co-Editor with Wilda Anderson, special issue of Romance Studies, 'Naming, Re-Naming and Un-Naming in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe' (in preparation)

''You're either anonymous or you're not!' Variations on Anonymity in Modern and Early Modern Culture', in MLN (2011), See here.

Editor, Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2010 (in preparation)

Editor and Translator, with Caroline Warman, Diderot and Rousseau: Networks of Enlightenment. Collected Essays by Marian Hobson (SVEC 2011:4). See here. And here and here for reviews.

'Eyes Wide Shut: Le Rêve de d'Alembert', in New Essays on Diderot, ed. James Fowler (Cambridge: CUP, 2011). See here.

'Philosophy, Ethics and the Work of Fiction: Diderot answer to Molyneux's Problem', in Fiction at the Frontiers: Law, Literature, and Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Alexis Tadié and Richard Scholar (Ashgate, 2010). See here.

'Sexe, mensonges et colonies: les discours de l'amour dans le Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville', Littératures classiques 69 (2009), pp. 17-34. Click here

'L'aveugle qui suit l'aveugle qui suit l'aveugle qui suit l'aveugle: la philosophie intertextuelle de la Lettre sur les aveugles', in L'aveugle et le philosophe, ed. Marion Chottin (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 Les Lumières en mouvement: la circulation des idées au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Isabelle Moreau (Lyon: ENS, 2009), pp. 173-197.Click here for link to article.

'Portraits and afterlives: Diderot and Montaigne', in Pre-Histories and Afterlives: Studies Towards a New Cultural History, ed. Anna Holland and Richard Scholar (Legenda, 2008), pp. 95-105. See here.

'The Judgement of Experience: Seeing and Reading in Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles', French Studies, XLII, no. 4 (2008), pp. 404-416. Click here for link to article.

'Diderot, Chardin et la matière sensible', Dix-Huitième Siècle, 39 (2007), pp. 577-593

'Paradoxe sur le portrait : Auto-portrait de Diderot en Montaigne', Diderot Studies, XXX (2007), pp. 197-210.Click here for link to article.

'Quant à Polly Baker... Une fiction qui en appelle à la démocratie', Raisons politiques, 27 (August 2007), pp. 119-122

Editor, with Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert and Jean Salem, Qu'est-ce que les lumières? (SVEC, 2006:12)

'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), pp. 143-154.Click here for link to article.

'Text, Image, Intertext: Diderot, Chardin, Pliny', SVEC, (2006:12), pp. 345-357.Click here for link to article.

'Racine in 1769 and 1910, or Racine à l'usage de ceux qui voient', SVEC, (2006:08), pp. 190-205.Click here for link to article.

''Des circonstances assez peu philosophiques': Diderot's blind man of Puiseaux', French Studies Bulletin, Volume LX number 99 (2006), pp. 33-36. Click here for link to article.

'Word meets Image: Racine and silent film', Word and Image, 19.4 (2003), pp. 247-260. Click here for link to article.

'Diderot's 'promenade Vernet' or the salon as landscape garden', French Studies, LV, no. 3 (2001), pp. 339-49

II. Modern

''Une sorte d'idylle dans la Halle': From ébauche to débauche in Le Ventre de Paris',  in  Esquisses/Ebauches: Projects and pre-texts in nineteenth-century French culture, ed. Sonya Stephens (Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 177-183

''Crânement beau tout de même': Still life and Le Ventre de Paris', French Studies, LVIII, no. 2 (2004), pp. 177-187. Click here for link to article.

'Word meets Image: Racine and silent film', Word and Image, 19.4 (2003), pp. 247-260. Click here for link to article.

'Courbet, Advertising and Femininity', French Cultural Studies, 12:1, No. 34 (2001), 109-14. Click here for link to article.

III. Academic Activism

Editor, Displacement, Asylum, Migration: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2004 (OUP, 2006). See here.

Editor, Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures (in preparation)