A Laboratory of Her Own: Women and Science in Spanish Culture gathers diverse voices to address women’s interaction with STEM fields in the context of Spanish cultural production. This volume focuses on the many ways the arts and humanities provide avenues for deepening the conversation about how women have been involved in, excluded from, and represented within the scientific realm.

While women’s historic exclusion from STEM fields has received increased scrutiny worldwide in recent years, women within the Spanish context have been perhaps even more peripheral given the complex socio-cultural structures emanating from gender norms and political ideologies dominant in the Spanish nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, Spanish female cultural producers have long been engaged with science and technology within the cultural realm, as expressed in literature, art, film, and other areas. Spanish cultural production offers diverse representations of the relationships between women, gender, sexuality, race, and the STEM fields.

A Laboratory of Her Own studies representations of Spanish women (including non-white women) and scientific cultural production from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. STEM topics include the environment, biodiversity, temporal and spatial theories, medicine and reproductive rights, neuroscience, robotics, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. These scientific themes and other issues are analyzed in narratives, paintings, poetry, photographs, science fiction, medical literature, translation, newswriting, film, and other forms.