Dr Kate Tunstall is Chair of French Sub-Faculty, Clarendon Associate Professor of French, and Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College. Her research interests are mostly in eighteenth-century and Enlightenment writing, from philosophy to æsthetics, Diderot in particular, though she has also published on the nineteenth-century novel, silent cinema, and eighteenth-century painting. She is the author of Blindness and Enlightenment (2011), and is currently working on a book project provisionally entitled Diderot’s Dressing Gowns. She is the editor of Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment (2012), and co-editor of a number of collections, including Naming, Renaming, and Un-Naming in Early Modern Europe (2013). Translation is central to her academic practice. She has translated three works by Diderot into English: 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. She 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). She is a member of Groupe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire de l’Histoire du Littéraire (GRIHL).
She is one of the organisers of Frib-Ox, a collaborative network between the Universities of oxford and Fribourg, which has become in Novermber 2018 co-funded by the TORCH International Partnership Scheme.