Publications
Journal articles
© Maria Tamboukou
Abstract:
In this paper, I follow trails of the auto/biographical turn in the field of gender and science, particularly focusing on women mathematicians’ epistolary narratives. The paper emerges from a wider Leverhulme funded project of writing a feminist genealogy of «automathographies», tracing women mathematicians’ historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture. What I argue is that letters are important auto/biographical documents in illuminating women’s epistemological and intellectual involvement in the making of scientific knowledge, which included the development of mathematical sciences, but was also expanded in the wider cultural formations of the European modernity. In doing so, I deploy the notion of «epistolary sensibility» as a methodological and epistemological approach to archival research with women mathematicians’ letters.
Key words: archives; automathographies; epistolary sensibility; women mathematicians.
Special Issue on Women’s History of Education and the Archival, Digital, Narrative, Auto/biographical, Affective and Spatial Turns
A Princess of Science? Becoming the first Woman Professor in Mathematics in Modern Europe
Nordic Journal of Educational History , Vol. 11 No. 2 (2024), 57-79.Abstract
In this paper I look at the process of becoming the first Woman Professor in Mathematics in Modern Europe by reading the personal and literary writings of Sofia Kovalevskaya. The paper emerges from a wider Leverhulme funded project of writing a feminist genealogy of “automathographies,” tracing women mathematicians’ historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture. What I argue is that it is essential to throw light onto the social, cultural, and political practices that some women mathematicians deployed in surpassing the restrictions and limitations of their gendered position and excel in the field of mathematical sciences and beyond. In this light, I initiate a process of intense memory work against a wider background within which women mathematicians’ figure as exceptional, albeit marginalized, and largely unknown subjects, and not as active agents, whose scientific, philosophical and literary work has had a huge impact on the cultural formations of modernity and beyond. By highlighting the importance of memory work, as a way of understanding the lasting effects of the past into the present, I trace new paths in the field of gender and science studies to confront women mathematicians’ marginalization within the archive and beyond.
History of Education, 2024, Vol. 53, no2, 380-402, open access, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0046760X.2024.2304339
Abstract
In this paper the author looks at processes of becoming a woman philosopher and scientist in eighteenth-century Europe, by focussing on educational experiences, discourses and practices revolving around the Italian mathematician, scientist and philosopher, Maria Gaetana Agnesi. The author uses the Arendtian notion of agonism as a lens through which she reads Agnesi’s manuscripts at the Ambrosiana Biblioteca in Milan, by pointing to the non-discursive affects that these documents emanate. By tracing women mathematicians’ historical emergence as subjects of knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture, the author proposes a reconsideration of the history of women’s science education as an agonistic process that has left traces in various archives of gender and science.Key words
Agonism, archival affects, gender and science, mathematics
Feeling Happiness, Feeling Science: Diffractive Readings of Émilie Du Châtelet’s and Sophie Germain’s Philosophical Writings
Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/2666318X-bja00020
Abstract
In this paper I read diffractively the philosophical writings of Émilie Du Châtelet and Sophie Germain, 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 longue 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.
Keywords: happiness; feelings; passions; women mathematicians; philosophers and scientists
‘Ever yours, mathematically’: women’s letters and the mathematical imagination
Gender and Education, open access, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2265283
Reading letters of an eighteenth-century femme philosophe: love as an existential and creative force in Émilie Du Châtelet’s correspondence
Women's History Review, open access, 2023 , https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2023.2252224
Abstract
In this article the author considers the letters of Émilie Du Châtelet, an eighteenth-century woman mathematician, philosopher and scientist. The central argument of the paper is that Du Châtelet’s letters leave traces of the process of becoming a femme philosophe, while also throwing light in her involvement in the scientific, philosophical and cultural formations of the early modern period. In this context Du Châtelet’s personal letters carry inscriptions of love as a creative force of life and are tightly intertwined with her ‘laboratory letters’, her correspondence with important mathematicians and scientists of her times. In thus making connections between ‘the personal’ and the ‘scientific’ in Du Châtelet’s correspondence, the paper sketches a feminist critical perspective on a plane of thinking around love as an existential force in its interrelation with mathematics, science and philosophy.
Key words: epistolary intra-actions, laboratory letter, love, scientific correspondences, women mathematicians
Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 2023, doi.10.1080/00309230.2023.2238621, open access
AbstractIn this paper the author considers the educational experiences and ideas of Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi, two women mathematicians, scientists and philosophers in eighteenth century Europe. By tracing their historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture, the author argues that we need to revisit the history of women’s science education and deconstruct the image of ‘the exceptional woman’. In doing so the author proposes the notion of the event as a useful theoretical lens through which we can understand women’s historical constitution as mathematicians, philosophers and scientists.
Key words: exceptionality, event, mathematics, science education, women
In this paper I draw on my research project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, through excavating Sofia Kovalevskaya’s auto/biographical documents. As the first woman to hold a chair in mathematics in modern Europe, but also as a novelist and playwright, Kovaleskaya is a figure that has inspired generations of women mathematicians, as well as feminist and literary scholars around the world. And yet, apart from her autobiography of her early years in Russia her personal diaries, journals and letters have never been translated in their entirety and remain inaccessible to non-Russian speaking scholars. What has emerged instead from the significant body of secondary literature that has evolved around her life and work is a meta-archive of scattered auto/biographical documents with different and often competing translations, fragments of lines, extracts and passages from her letters, diary entries, as well as novels and plays that create palimpsests of traces of the self. In addressing questions arising from working with fragments and traces of the self, I consider the importance of creative imagination in forming entanglements between the researcher and her archival figures. In this light archival research is configured as a process of doing, learning and understanding, an ongoing becoming emerging after layers of documents have been assembled, organized, reordered, read, transcribed, translated and effectively rewritten.