Keynote Addresses and Conferences

Keynote Addresses

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.

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.

Refereed Conference Papers

La vitesse de la pensée :

Voyager avec Sofia Kovalevskaya

Cette communication retrace les trajectoires urbaines et transurbaines de Sofia Kovalevskaïa (1850–1891), depuis son départ de Saint-Pétersbourg sous le couvert d’un mariage blanc jusqu’à son dernier voyage de la Riviera à Stockholm, où elle devient la première femme à occuper une chaire de mathématiques dans l’Europe moderne. Son parcours traverse des villes qui ne sont pas de simples lieux de résidence, mais des scènes de négociation, de transformation et de déplacement — Heidelberg, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm — chacune inscrite dans des réseaux croisés d’échanges académiques, de bouleversements politiques et d’expérimentations littéraires. Ces villes, et les infrastructures qui les relient (chemins de fer, salons, bibliothèques, routes postales), façonnent les rythmes de la vie intellectuelle et affective de Kovalevskaïa.

En mettant l’accent sur l’échelle urbaine et les réseaux de circulation, cette étude examine comment les pratiques mathématiques et littéraires de Kovalevskaïa sont enracinées dans des environnements urbains concrets et dynamisées par ses déplacements entre eux. Ses carnets, lettres et écrits — des équations différentielles aux récits autobiographiques — enregistrent les temporalités de l’exil, l’architecture des salons, la sociabilité des cafés, et les contraintes liées à l’accès genré à l’espace urbain. En retraçant sa mobilité à travers ces paysages urbains matériels et discursifs, l’intervention montre comment Kovalevskaïa a participé à des réseaux de savoir transnationaux et transdisciplinaires, tout en les transformant.

Plutôt que de la présenter comme une figure isolée ou une pionnière exceptionnelle, je l’inscris dans une géographie urbaine multiscalaire de la mobilité féminine, façonnée à la fois par des contraintes et des improvisations. Sa vie constitue un exemple de la manière dont les femmes ont circulé dans les mondes intellectuels urbains et les ont reconfigurés — souvent depuis leurs marges — en défiant les rôles spatiaux prescrits à travers des pratiques de déplacement, d’inscription et de rencontre. Le mouvement devient ici une méthode, et la ville, non pas un simple décor, mais une force active dans la configuration de la pensée et la redéfinition de ce que signifie être une femme dans les sciences et la littérature.

Colloque « De ville en ville – Retracer les circulations et réseaux urbains au prisme des mobilités féminines »

Paper presented at the AtGender Conference, Gender Studies and the Precarious Labour of Making a Difference

Utrecht University, Netherlands,

September 27-29, 2024.

‘They have made me a princess, I wish they had given me a salary’: considering the first woman professor of mathematics in modern Europe

In this paper I retrace the academic career of Sofia Kovalevskaya, the first woman to hold a chair in mathematics in modern Europe. 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, 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.

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.

From Palibino to Riviera: Narrative Rhythmanalysis of Sofia Kovalevskaya's literary writings

Paper presented at the 7th European Narratology Network Conference

Monopoli, Italy, 26-28 September 2023

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