Colloquium with Isabel Morant in La Nau about the French intellectual and mathematician Mme du Châtelet
- University Culture Service
- May 26th, 2025

La Nau Cultural Centre takes on Monday 26 May, at 7:00pm, the colloquium ‘Mme du Châtelet (1706-1749) – Razón y pasión en el Siglo de las Luces’, with Isabel Morant, Emeritus fulltime university professor of History in the UV. Specialist in History studies of women and gender, will analyse the trajectory of this French mathematician and intellectual woman from the 18th century, highlighting her intellectual paper in Enlightenment circles and as author of philosophic and scientific works. She was the first translator of the work of Newton and diffuser of her own theories in continental Europe. Starting with the analysis of writings and the biography of Mme du Châtelet, the conference will introduce us into the debates of the century about sex, reason and passion relationships in a great social and intellectual transformation context.
The act, which is inscribed in the Cicle de Dones Creadores of the Escola Europea de Pensament Lluís Vives UV, will have place at the Aula Magna and will be presented by Maxime Henri-Rousseau, director of the Institut Français of Valencia, who co-organises the activity.
Isabel Morant is Emeritus fulltime university professor of Modern and Contemporary History and exVice-Principal for the Universitat de València. She was the first woman to be Vice-Principal for the Universitat de València in the first government chosen democratically by the Cloister in 1984, until 1990.
Furthermore, she promoted and directed the collection ‘Feminismes’, born in 1991 as a group editorial project in the Universitat de València and the editorial Càtedra, Madrid. Her goal was to give way to researches about inequality of women and difference of sexes, put in prominence by international feminism, and covering the demand of a public that, increasingly, was interested in the knowledge of topics that would be edited inside the collection.
She was pioneer in the history studies of women, she participated in the creation of a historiography that she began to develop in the 80s in Europe and America. At the same time, she promoted the creation of new matters that started to be taught in the regulated studies of the Faculty of History from the 90s. She has directed the ‘Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina’, published by the editorial Càtedra between 2005 and 2006. The work, in four volumes and with almost 400 pages, stands out the advances of historiographic production that we denominate history of women and gender, produced from side to side of the Athlantic. In this edition, that has been well received in the international area, it has showed the existence of a historiography, written in Spanish, little known in other academic areas, both in Europe and the USA.
In ‘El lugar de las mujeres en la Historia. Desplazando los límites de la representación del mundo’ (edited 2023 by the Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat de València, in two volumes) stands out the didactic goal of a work that, forwarded to professors and History students, pretends to contribute to the integration in the History studies of women and gender in the different levels of teaching History.