Letters, Gender and Mathematics: a feminist genealogical approach

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.