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 book-length 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.

You can download my cv here.