Revisiting Life Writing through Numbers and Narratives: Tracing Relations, Rhythms, and Archives

Abstract

In this talk, Professor Maria Tamboukou returns to her long engagement with life writing through the lens of her latest book, Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies. This work marks both a continuation and a transformation of the questions that have shaped my research: how lives are written, imagined, and understood through relational, rhythmic, and archival practices. Looking back, she traces how her methodological and conceptual vocabulary has gradually taken shape—how concepts such as narrative rhythmanalysis, epistolary sensibility, narrative personae, and archival rhythms have emerged organically from the practice of engaging with letters, diaries, and fragments. These ideas did not arise from a pre-given theoretical framework but from working within the materials themselves—listening to their rhythms, tracing their absences, and following their echoes across time. In Numbers and Narratives, this approach extends into the lives and writings of women in mathematics, where imagination, notation, and narrative intertwine in unexpected ways. Revisiting this trajectory, she reflects on how relation, rhythm, and opacity have become both the substance and the method of her work. Life writing, as she understands it now, is less a genre than a practice of thought—an epistemic and ethical engagement with the traces, resistances, and temporalities through which lives are continuously composed.

About Professor Maria Tamboukou

Tamboukou is a scholar in the field of Gender and Feminist Studies. She has held academic positions in a number of institutions, including her current position as Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of East London, Affiliated Professor in Gender Studies at Linnaeus University Sweden and Adjunct Professor at Griffith University, Australia. She has held several research fellowships, most recently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2022–2025) for her project. Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies. Her work explores feminist philosophies and epistemologies in the social sciences, narrative inquiry, and archival research. She has written widely in these areas, publishing ten monographs, two co-authored books, four edited collections, and over a hundred articles and book chapters. Her work appears in English, Greek, and French, and has been translated into several other languages, including Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Welsh.