Why have there been so few women mathematicians? This book does not seek an answer in absence but in the forces, ruptures, and intensities that shape the becoming of a femme philosophea mathematician, scientist, and philosopherwithin the shifting assemblages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Moving beyond exclusion as mere negation, it traces the conditions of emergence, the differential speeds and slippages through which women entered, inhabited, and transformed the mathematical sciences.
Drawing on auto/biographical documents, literary and philosophical writings, and the materialities of the archive, this book approaches the digital turn not as a tool but as a plane of composition, where new trajectories of memory work unfold. Between historiography and fabulation, it maps a space where womens mathematical thought was not only possible but inevitableif only in flashes, excesses, and détours.
This book will resonate with scholars in the sociology, history and philosophy of science and mathematics, particularly those engaged with feminist thought, the politics of knowledge, and experimental archival methods.
Introduction: Becoming a mathematician, philosopher and scientist
1.
Memory Machines and Archival Traces
2. Epistolary Entanglements: Between the
Personal and the Scientific
3. The Dynamics and Politics of Translation
4.
Exceptional women? The Agonistics of Knowledge
5. Love and Mathematics:
Existential Choices and Intellectual Freedom
6. Philosophical Ruminations and
Process Epistemologies
7. Narrative Rhythmanalysis: Listening to the Echo of
the Subject Conclusion: Future Pasts: Charting Assemblages
Maria Tamboukou is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of East London and Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2022-25). She has held academic positions in a number of international institutions, including the Hannah Arendt Centre for Political Studies at the University of Verona, Italy. Her research activity develops in the areas of philosophies and epistemologies in the social sciences, feminist theories, narrative analytics and archival research. She has published in English, Greek and French and her work has been translated in Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Welsh and Greek. She is the author of 9 monographs, 2 co-authored books and 4 edited volumes on research methods, including her latest monograph, Epistolary Narratives of Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics in 2023. Writing histories of the present is the central focus of her work, currently configured as an assemblage of feminist genealogies.
