Conferences, Lectures and Seminars
2024
A Mathematical Monster or a Princess of Science?
In this talk I considered the process of becoming the first Woman Professor in Mathematics in Modern Europe by reading Sofia Kovalevskaya’s personal writings and particularly her letters to the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler. While Kovalevskaya’s life and work has been celebrated, little attention has been paid to the challenges she faced in obtaining an academic position after the completion of her PhD in 1874, as well as her struggle to be accepted as a professor of mathematics, even in the liberal new university of Stockholm. The fact that she started her academic career without a salary not only speaks tons of the gendered regimes of academic institutions in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, but also traces a genealogical line of precarious academic work that reaches our days.
Rhythmanalysis and
the echo of the subject
Temporalities, Rhythms & Complexity Lab
Sunchronos Institute
Exploring Rhythmanalysis as a Method, Research Symposium Series 2024
March 18, 2024
Epistolary Archives and Sensibilities: Between the Personal and the Scientific in Women Mathematicians’ Correspondence
Annual lecture for the Manchester Centre for Correspondence Studies, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Arts and Languages and the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, March 5, 2024, University of Manchester
Tracking Processual Pockets of Thought in Sociology and Social Theory
Keynote address for the Sociological Association Ireland Postgraduate Conference 2024, 'Reshaping Boundaries: Sociological Perspectives on Globalization and Cultural Dynamics', hosted by the University of Limerick, February 24, 2024.
Epistolary Becomings
Archival Traces and Diffractive Readings
Plenary lecture for the International Methodological Seminar on ‘Heritage of ordinary letters: research goals and methodologies’, Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore’, January 26, 2024, on-line.
2023
Diffractions on Happiness in Émilie du Châtelet and Sophie Germain’s philosophical writings
Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) at Maynooth University, Ireland, November 17-18, 2023.
Abstract
In this paper I look at the philosophical writings of Émilie du Châtelet and Sophie Germain, two French women mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, who lived and worked in pre and post-revolutionary France, respectively. In doing so I read their work diffractively, particularly focusing on their engagement with happiness, both as a theoretical notion and as a lived experience. What I argue is that their take on happiness has nothing to do with the gendered norms and discourses of happiness that they were seen and judged by, in the long durée of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their happiness was more in line with the joys and pleasures of knowledge, understanding, living and creating. While feelings are central in both women’s theorization of happiness, they are deployed along different strands in the philosophical history of emotions and affects and despite their original and unique contribution, they are still absent from it.
Letters, gender and mathematics:
an award letter too late to receive
Paper presented at the The Epistolary Research Network (TERN) Conference, 6-7 October 2023
Abstract
In 1816, Sophie Germain became the first woman to win the Grand Prix de Mathématiques, awarded by the Class of Mathematics and Physics of the French Institute for her theory of vibrations of general curved and plane elastic surfaces. And yet she did not attend the ceremony award, due to a malfunction of receiving the award letter together with her tickets for the ceremony. What she received instead was a cold letter at the eleventh hour advising her that she was invited to attend, which she did not. In considering the letter that Germain never received as a sign of the times, in this paper I look into the role of mathematical correspondence in both including and excluding women from the world of science during the early modern period and beyond. My approach draws on archival research with Germain’s mathematical correspondence in the Archives and Manuscripts of La Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) and at the Biblioteca Moreniana de Firenze and emerges from a wider project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Narrative Rhythmanalysis of Sofia Kovalevskaya's literary writings
Paper presented at the 7th European Narratology Network Conference
Monopoli, Italy, 26-28 September 2023
Abstract
In this paper I consider spatiotemporal rhythms in Sofia Kovalevskaya’s literary writings. Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) was the first woman professor in mathematics in modern Europe with significant contributions in the mathematical sciences. But alongside her scientific work she also wrote novels, poetry and theatrical plays, famously claiming that ‘it is not possible to be a great mathematician without having the soul of a poet’. Her literary writings were celebrated at her times and beyond, but research around her has mostly focused on her mathematical achievements. Kovalevskaya was an exemplary cosmopolitan subject of her times and geographies: she was born and grew up in Russia, studied in Germany, lived in Paris for extended periods of time and eventually settled down in Sweden, when she was offered an academic position in Stockholm University. The spatiotemporal rhythms of her lived experiences are thus beautifully entangled in the narrative modalities of her literary writings, and it is their flow, forces and energies that I follow in this paper through the beats of what I have configured in my work as narrative rhythmanalysis. What I argue is that narrative rhythmanalysis brings to the fore the catalytic role of space/time/matter in literary creation, opening up new analytical paths and insights. As it engages with literary worlds and figures, narrative rhythmanalysis can never be conclusive however: it is rather a process, constantly unearthing new signs and meanings around subjects and their worlds.
Public seminar
University of East London
School of Education and Communities
April 26, 2023, 5-7pm
2022
Keynote lecture for the International workshop 'The Same Event? Morphologies, Reflections, Disseminations', an event of the project Baltic Peripeties: Narratives of Reformations, Revolutions and Catastrophes.
University of Tartu, Institute of Cultural Research,
December 15-17, 2022.
In this lecture I trace events in the process of becoming a woman natural philosopher and mathematician. My narrative inquiry revolves around the archive of Émilie Du Châtelet. The central argument of the lecture is that du Châtelet's engagement with science is a pure event, free of all normal, or normative causality around what it meant to be a women in her geographies and times. That is to say, what defines Chatelet’s becoming a scientist is difficult to be explained by simply analysing economic, political or socio-cultural conditions. However, it happened: du Châtelet and other women began to think of themselves – their relation to themselves and to others – differently. And it is this subjective redeployment, this all-too-difficult to understand event, that is the only explanation we have for du Chatelet’s becoming. Although this new subjectivity must have come about through a series of subtle and imperceptible adjustments, it nevertheless explodes onto the scene: du Chatelet and other women scientists suddenly imagined and indeed demanded a society that would match their new subjectivity.
Past events
Women in Mathmatics, seminar series, November 2018
Numbers and Narraives: Becoming a Woman Mathematician,
LSE, Department of Mathematics, November 28, 2018
Activating the Archive, February 28, 2019, Goldsmiths College
errantry in the archive.pptxYou can listen to the talk here
(2021) Troubling the archive: auto/biographical reiterations of the self. British Sociological Association, Auto/biography Study Group Summer Conference, July 15-16, 2021, on-line.