Invited Talks and Seminars

Revisiting Life Writing through Numbers and Narratives: Tracing Relations, Rhythms, and Archives

Invited talk at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University UK in the context of the project 'Surfacing Knowledge from doctoral research: mining the hidden potential of international doctoral theses', October 28, 2025.

In this talk, I return to my long engagement with life writing through the lens of my latest book, Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies. This work marks both a continuation and a transformation of the questions that have shaped my research: how lives are written, imagined, and understood through relational, rhythmic, and archival practices. Looking back, I trace how my methodological and conceptual vocabulary has gradually taken shape—how concepts such as narrative rhythmanalysis, epistolary sensibility, narrative personae, and archival rhythms have emerged organically from the practice of engaging with letters, diaries, and fragments. These ideas did not arise from a pre-given theoretical framework but from working within the materials themselves—listening to their rhythms, tracing their absences, and following their echoes across time. In Numbers and Narratives, this approach extends into the lives and writings of women in mathematics, where imagination, notation, and narrative intertwine in unexpected ways. Revisiting this trajectory, I reflect on how relation, rhythm, and opacity have become both the substance and the method of my work. Life writing, as I understand it now, is less a genre than a practice of thought—an epistemic and ethical engagement with the traces, resistances, and temporalities through which lives are continuously composed.

A Mathematical Monster or a Princess of Science?

In this talk, I explore the journey of becoming the first woman professor of mathematics in modern Europe by examining Sofia Kovalevskaya’s personal writings, particularly her correspondence with the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler. Although Kovalevskaya’s life and accomplishments have been widely celebrated—she was hailed as a 'Princess of Science' upon her arrival in Stockholm—the substantial challenges she encountered in securing an academic position after earning her PhD in 1874, as well as her ongoing struggle for recognition as a professor, even within the progressive atmosphere of Stockholm University, have been less thoroughly examined. The renowned playwright August Strindberg called her a 'monster' when she secured her first fixed-term position in 1894, yet it appears that so-called 'monstrosities' have often played a distinctive and influential role in feminist histories.

Invited talk for the on-line colloquium, ‘Reimagining Higher Education Otherwise’, organized by the Immersive Research Institute (IRI) of the Technological University Ireland in collaboration with the Sociological Association of Ireland and the European University Network, June 7, 2024, on-line.

Rhythmanalysis and

the echo of the subject

Temporalities, Rhythms & Complexity Lab

SunKhronos 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

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.

Numbers and Narratives: A Public seminar, University of East London

School of Education and Communities

April 26, 2023, 5-7pm

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