Letters, Gender and Mathematics: a feminist genealogical approach

Maria Tamboukou

doi:10.14201/fde.1266

Autores/as

Maria Tamboukou University of East London, UK Autor/a

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14201/fde.1266

Palabras clave:

archives, automathographies, epistolary sensibility, women mathematicians

Resumen

In this paper, I follow trails of the auto/biographical turn in the field of gender and science, particularly focusing on women mathematicians’ epistolary narratives. The paper emerges from a wider Leverhulme funded project of writing a feminist genealogy of «automathographies», tracing women mathematicians’ historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture. What I argue is that letters are important auto/biographical documents in illuminating women’s epistemological and intellectual involvement in the making of scientific knowledge, which included the development of mathematical sciences, but was also expanded in the wider cultural formations of the European modernity. In doing so, I deploy the notion of «epistolary sensibility» as a methodological and epistemological approach to archival research with women mathematicians’ letters.

Referencias

Altman, J. (1982). Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Ohio: Ohio State University Press.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Borgato, M., T., Passeron, I., (2018). Introduction. In Borgato, M. T., Neuenschwander, E., Passeron, I. (Eds.), Mathematical Correspondences and Critical Editions, (pp.vii-xxi). Cham: Birkhäuser.

Bruder, A. (2011), Dear Alma Mater: Women’s Epistolary Education in the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, 1873–1897’. The New England Quarterly, LXXXIV (4), pp. 588-620.

Cavazza, M. (2009). Between Modesty and Spectacle: Women and Science in Eighteenth Century Italy. In Findlen, P., Sama, C. and Rowarth, W. (Eds), Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, (pp.275-302). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cavazza, M. (2014). The Biographies of Laura Bassi. In Govoni, P. and Franceschi, Z., A. Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender and Genre, (pp. 67-86). Göttingen: V&R Unipress.

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F., (1988 [1980]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, B. Massumi (transl.). London: The Athlone Press.

Del Centina, A., 2005. Letters of Sophie Germain Preserved in Florence. Historia Mathematica 32, 60–75.

Del Centina, A. and Fiocca, A., (2018). On the Correspondence of Sophie Germain. In Borgato, M. T., Neuenschwander, E., Passeron, I. (Eds.), Mathematical Correspondences and Critical Editions, (pp.147-166). Cham: Birkhäuser.

Favret, M., A. (1993). Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ferry, Giorgina. 2014. Telling Stories or Making History? Two Lives in X-ray Crystallography. In Govoni, P. and Franceschi, Z., A. Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender and Genre, (pp.55-63). Göttingen: V&R Unipress.

Findlen, Paula. 2014. Listening to the Archives: Searching for the Eighteenth-Century Women of Science In Govoni, P. and Franceschi, Z., A. Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender and Genre (pp.87-115). Göttingen: V&R Unipress.

Foucault, Michel. 1986. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, D., F. Bouchard and S. Simon (trans). In Rabinow, P. (Ed.), The Foucault Reader, (pp.76-100). Harmondsworth: Peregrine.

George, S. (2011). Epistolary Exchange: the Familiar Letter and the Female Botanist 1760-1820. Journal of Literature and Science 4(1), pp.12-29.

Govoni, P. (2000). Biography: A Critical Tool to Bridge the History of Science and the History of Women in Science, Nuncius 1, pp.399– 409.

Govoni, P. (2014). Crafting Scientific (Auto)Biographies. In Govoni, P. and Franceschi, Z., A. Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender and Genre, (pp.7-30). Göttingen: V&R Unipress.

Govoni, P. and Franceschi, Z., A. (2014). Eds. Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender and Genre. Gottingen: V&R Unipress.

Halmos, P. (1985). I want to become a mathematician: an automathography. New York: Springer.

Hankins, T., L. (1979). In Defense of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of Science, History of Science, 17, pp.1–16.

Hyvärinen. M. (2010). Revisiting the narrative turns, Life Writing 7(1), pp.69-82.

Jolly, M. (2008). In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Keller, E., F. (1997). The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics. In Ruddick, S. and Daniels, P. (Eds.) Working it Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work, (pp.71-91). New York: Pantheon.

Koblitz, Hibner, A., (1989). Career and Home Life in the1880s: The Choices of Mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya. In Abir-am, P.G. and Outram, D. (Eds), Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789, 1979, (pp.172-190). New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.

Kochina, P. (1985). Love and Mathematics: Sofia Kovalevskaya, M. Burov (trans). Moscow: Mir Publishers.

Kölving, U. et A. Brown. (Eds.). (2018). La Correspondance d’Emilie du Chatelet, Ferney-Voltaire, Centre international d’étude du xviiie siècle, 2 Vols.

Kovaleskaya, S., V. (1951). Memories and Letters [Kоваевской, Cофье, B. Восnомuнанця unuсьма]. Moscow: AN SSSR.

Mackay, J., S. (1903). Mathematical Correspondence - Robert Simson, Matthew Stewart, James Stirling. Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society 21, pp.2-39.

Mazzotti, M. (2007). The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mazzotti, M. (2014). Rethinking Scientific Biography: The Enlightenement of Maria Gaetana Agnesi. In In Govoni, P. and Franceschi, Z., A. Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender and Genre, (pp.117-137). Göttingen: V&R Unipress.

Moore N., A. Salter, L. Stanley and M. Tamboukou. (2016). The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge.

Plummer, K. (2000). Documents of Life 2: An invitation to Critical Humanism. London: Sage.

Russell, G. (2007). Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sarton, G. (1936). The Study of the History of Mathematics and the Study of the History of Science. New York: Dover Publications.

Shafer A. (1987). Foreword In Grinstein, L. S., and Campbell, P., J. (Eds.), Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook, (pp.ix-xii). New York: Greenwood Press.

Schurch, M. (2019). Women, Empiricism and Epistolarity, 1740-1810. PhD Thesis, University of York.

Simon-Martin, M.- (2020). Barbara Bodichon’s Epistolary Education: Unfolding Feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stanley, L. (1992). The Auto/biographical I, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Stanley L. (2017). The Racialising Process: Whites Writing Whiteness in Letters, South Africa 1770s-1970s. Edinburgh: X Press Independent Publisher.

Tamboukou, M. (2024) A Princess of Science? Becoming the First Woman Professor in Mathematics in Modern Europe. Nordic Journal of Educational History, 11(2): 57-79, https://doi.org/10.36368/njedh.v11i2.1059.

Tamboukou, M. (2023). Reading letters of an eighteenth-century femme philosophe: love as an existential and creative force in Émilie Du Châtelet’s correspondence, Women’s History Review, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2023.2252224

Tamboukou, M. (2022). Traces in the Archive: Re-imagining Sofia Kovalevskaya, Life Writing, 19(3), pp. 341-356.

Tamboukou, M. (2020). Epistolary Lives: fragments, sensibility, assemblages in auto/biographical research. In Chapell, A, & Parsons, J. M. (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography (pp. 157-164). Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Tamboukou, M. (2017). Reassembling Documents of Life in the Archive. The European Journal of Life Writing, 6, pp. 1-19, https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.6.215

Tamboukou, M. (2015). Sewing, Fighting and Writing: Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture, London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Tamboukou, M. (2003). Writing feminist genealogies. Journal of Gender Studies, 12(1), pp. 5-19.

Warren, James. (2007). Diogenes Laertius, Biographer of Philosophy. In König, J. and Whitmars, T. (Eds.). Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, (pp.133–149). Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Zinsser, J., P. (2006). Émilie Du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment. London: Penguin.