Kirsten Tambling

Kirsten Tambling is a writer and researcher, and Curator of The Clockworks, London. She has published on eighteenth-century French and British art and the history of collections and also has an interest in the intersection between art and psychiatry, particularly nineteenth-century ‘asylum art’: in 2018, she was co-curator of the exhibition James Henry Pullen: Inmate, Inventor, Genius at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. Her first degree was in English, at the University of Cambridge, followed by an M. Phil. in Eighteenth-century and Romantic Studies. Her PhD (Birkbeck, 2018) was on seduction in the work of William Hogarth and Jean-Antoine Watteau. Between 2019-2022 she was Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’ project at King’s College London, as part of which she co-edited the essay collection Shakespeare’s Afterlife in the Royal Collection: Dynasty, Ideology and National Culture with Gordon McMullan, Kate Retford and Sally Barnden. She has taught at Birkbeck and the Courtauld Institute of Art (on the MA Curating the Art Museum Programme, of which she is also a graduate) and she writes regularly for Apollo Magazine, ArtUK and The Art Newspaper. Her monograph, Shakespearean Objects in the Royal Collection, 1714-1939 will be published by Oxford University Press in late 2025.