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Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2024. 'Affects, Passions and Precarious academic Labour'://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/september-2024
Affects, Passions and Precarious Academic Labour
Affects, Passions and Precarious Academic Labour
In September I visited Utrecht for the AtGender 2024 Conference, Gender Studies and the Precarious Labour of Making a Difference, held at Utrecht University, between September 27 and 29. When I initially embarked on this project, I never imagined it would resonate not only with the ongoing marginalization of women in mathematics well into the 21st century, but also with a broader contemporary issue affecting academia worldwide: the precarious nature of academic labour. Yet, a brief excerpt from a letter Sofia Kovalevskaya wrote to her brother-in-law, Alexander Kovalevsky in December 1883, shortly after arriving in Stockholm to take up the unpaid position of the privat docent [lecturer], captures the essence of this shared struggle: “You see, I have been made into a princess too! They would be better to assign me a salary.” (Kovalevskaya 1951, 276)
Following tracks and traces of Kovalevskaya's correspondence with Gösta Mittag-Lefler at the archives of the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm in June 2024, I was able to look at the nuances of Kovalevskaya's intense and unpaid academic labour during her first term in the mathematics department of Stockholm University. She dedicated considerable effort to designing her course on partial differential equations, preparing lecture notes, delivering her lectures in German—a foreign language she had never fully mastered—and leading graduate seminars. Her diary reveals that the first few days after beginning her lectures were marked by an acute sense of loneliness.
On 11 February, 1884 [30 January in the Julian calendar] Kovalevskaya delivered her first lecture, which was received enthusiastically not only in terms of its subject content and lively presentation, but also as an event that opened up a new chapter in the field of gender and science: ‘the auditorium was full; people were aware of the historic nature of the occasion’ Mittag-Leffler wrote to Weierstrass on 18 February, 1884. (in Kochina 1985, 130) This is the impression from one of her students:
Sofya Kovalevskaya was dressed in a black velvet frock and wore no decorations. She armed herself with some chalk and started the lecture before 15 auditors very simply and whole-heartedly, about the Dirichlet principle. But she seemed to feel constrained because she did not once turn from the blackboard and left directly when she finished the lecture. (in ibid.)
There is nothing unusual in this reminiscence of Kovalevskaya’s first lecture. Paul Halmos has written about the mathematician's ‘stage fright’ experience of teaching and public talks: ‘stage fright, in the sense of being keyed up, slightly nervous, and temporarily unable to concentrate on anything , is something that has always been with me six minutes for each new class: five minutes before it first meets and one minute after it starts’ (1985, 44). Moreover, ‘stage fright’ would also recur during ‘colloquium talks and all other kinds of public appearance’ (44). In Halmos’ recollections, ‘stage fright’ might be the wrong name for a wider existential phenomenon, as ‘it may be just a subconscious automatic reviving up that gives one the impetus needed to overcome the large inertia of every beginning’. (44)
This stage fright must have also been exacerbated by the fact that Kovalevskaya's lecture was a public event, since apart from the twelve enrolled students, ‘professors, university officials, and interested citizens came to see “the princess of science” begin her teaching career’, as Mittag-Leffler wrote to Weierstrass, concluding with the claim that ‘it was clear even from the first class that she would be a good lecturer’. (in Kochina, Love and Mathematics, 130) Kovalevskaya’s diary gives a different taste of ‘the princess’ experience: ‘Gave the first lecture today. Don’t know whether it was good or bad, but I know that it was very sad to go home and feel so lonely in this world. The feeling was extremely strong in those moments. Encore une étape de la vie derrière moi.’ [One more stage in my life left behind]
Historians, sociologists and philosophers of science have persistently downplayed or even denied the role of emotions, affects and feelings in the making of scientific knowledges, as well as the enactment of scientific practices, Paola Govoni has noted. (2014, 15) Putting forward the project of existential scientific biographies, Thomas Söderqvist (1996) has argued that ‘the passions of the scientist-both negative emotions, such as anguish and anxiety, despair and dread, embarrassment and fear, frustration and sadness, and positive emotions such as joy, hope and love’ (65) open up vistas in his/her existential uniqueness and embodied singularity, the scientist’s ‘original potential’ in Karl Jasper’s existential vocabulary (cited in Söderqvist 1996, 60). Drawing on various sources Söderqvist has shown that passions become important components in the making of scientific knowledge itself: ‘in autobiographical reports several scientists have used a varied passionate lexicon, for example, the intense feelings of pain associated with trying to solve a problem, the joy when the solution comes, and at the same time the feeling of fear, anxiety, even terror during the process’. (67)
But if ‘the topic of passion is not a matter of course in science biography’ (65), imagine what has happened in the writing and reading of women scientists’ auto/biographies, such as Kovalevskaya's’s diary entry above. When Evelyn Fox Keller submitted her manuscript A Feeling for the Organism, on the life and work of the Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock, the publisher returned it with the suggestion for a change of title among several corrections, ‘marking with a red pencil to cut out just about everything that had to do with the emotional side of her scientific life’, Keller has written. (2014, 36) Having borrowed the phrase ‘a feeling for the organism’ from McClintock herself, Keller insisted that feeling should not be taken as ‘a feminine trait’, arguing that ‘feeling’ was an important component of McClintock’s scientific work, ‘a tradition that was particularly associated with the “great minds” of science’ (36). Keller also remembers that when her book was eventually published, the Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Northeastern University, she was working at the time, ‘came and thanked me for giving him permission to do mathematics the way he always wanted to do it’ (36-7) Indeed, if we patiently follow the traces of Sofia’s becoming-professor of mathematics, we discern the design left behind the life of her passions, alongside the life of her mathematical mind.
In a letter to Alexander Kovalevskii, sent in the autumn of 1884, Kovalevskaya had written that her lectures were ‘a great trouble’ (Kovaleskaya
1951, 508n287), always fluctuating between success and failure: ‘I try hard to give them properly and clearly; sometimes I succeed and then I am happy, but sometimes things don’t go so smoothly’.(ibid.) Kovalevskaya was particularly attentive to her students’ expression in understanding whether they were interested or not: ‘I notice that I don’t manage to interest my listeners and to present everything in a clear light, and this makes me very sad’ (ibid.), she wrote in the same letter. It took time for Kovalevskaya to ‘realize’ herself as an academic, but she eventually became a lecturer who could see through the eyes of her students, realizing their abilities and indeed awakening and strengthening them. As her friend Ellen Key wrote in her memorial article, published in the Swedish journal Dagny in 1892, Kovalevskaya was an outstanding teacher, who took into account the existential uniqueness of her students and thus inspired and triggered their creative abilities. A young woman, who was among her students, wrote after her death: ‘I felt as if I was completely seen through by Mrs Kovalevsky could, as if I was made of glass’. (in Kovalevskaya 1951, 413) The student further added that she would always feel calm ‘under this affectionate, confident look’ (ibis.), as well as her teacher’s conviction that ‘real mathematics is the least dry of all sciences, opening up a vast field of creative fantasy and speculative views’. (ibid.)
References
Govoni, Paola. 2014. ‘Crafting Scientific (Auto)Biographies’. In Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender and Genre, edited by Paola Govoni and Zelda, Alice Franceschi, 7-30. Göttingen: V&R Unipress.
Halmos, Paul. 1985. I Want to Be a Mathematician: An Automathography. New York: Springer.
Keller, Fox, Evelyn . 2014. 'Pot- holes Everywhere: How (not) to Read my Biography of Barbara McClintock. In Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender and Genre, edited by Paola Govoni and Zelda, Alice Franceschi, 33-42. Göttingen: V&R Unipress.
Kochina, Pelageya. 1985. Love and Mathematics: Sofia Kovalevskaya. Translated by Michael Burov. Moscow: Mir Publishers.
Kovalevskaya, Sofia. 1951. Memories and Letters [Kоваевской, Cофье, B. Восnомuнанця unuсьма]. Moscow: AN SSSR.
Söderqvist Thomas. 1996. ‘Existential projects and existential choice in science: science biography as an edifying genre’. In Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, edited by Shortland Michael, Yeo Richard, 45-84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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