Tess Eastgate

Tess received her BA and MSt from Oxford in French and Spanish; her Spanish studies focused primarily on the reception of Classical Greek and Latin material in the Baroque, especially in the works of Luis de Góngora. Now a DPhil student in French, Tess holds a Collaborative Doctoral Award, undertaken with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In collaboration with the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, Tess will produce a physical edition and a digital publication of Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with the politician Antoine Barnave. Her thesis will explore this correspondence alongside other letters written by women to politicians during the revolutionary period; in particular, those of Marie-Jeanne Roland and Germaine de Staël. This research combines her interests in palaeography, digital humanities, and early modern women’s agency and expression; it is supported by the Clarendon Fund, and supervised by Professor Catriona Seth FBA MAE. Tess is also interested in historical linguistics, book history, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts.