Dr Brigitte Stenhouse
Historian of Mathematics

I am a Lecturer in History of Mathematics at The Open University. 

My current research considers the circulation of mathematics within and between scientific households in 19th-century Britain. This project will focus on how mathematics complemented studies of the physical sciences, and how mathematical ideas were creatively translated, adapted, or indeed removed depending on each individual’s mathematical aptitude.

I was previously the Kenneth O. May Postdoctoral Fellow in History of Mathematics at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto; a Visiting Research Fellow and an Associate Lecturer in Mathematics at The Open University; and a Departmental Lecturer in the History of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.

In September 2021, I defended my doctoral thesis, Mary Somerville: Being and Becoming a Mathematician, at The Open University where I was supervised by Professor June Barrow-Green. I considered how Mary Somerville (1780-1872) accessed mathematical knowledge and communities, and what it meant for her to be a mathematician in nineteenth-century Western Europe. (Read online here). More broadly my doctoral research considered differential calculus in 19th-century Western Europe; circulation of knowledge, especially translations of mathematics; and the effects of gender on access to knowledge and knowledge production. 

I have experience in digital humanities through cataloguing metadata of over 600 letters written to or by Mary Somerville, which is now available at epsilon.ac.uk. In addition I was a postdoctoral research assistant on the Davy Notebooks Project, a crowdsourcing project producing digital transcriptions of 75 of Humphry Davy's notebooks. 

I hold a Master of Mathematics degree (MMath) from Somerville College, University of Oxford.