Current staff

Maarit Forde

Lecturer

E-mail: maarit.forde(at)helsinki.fi
tel +358(0)504762124
Unioninkatu 35, room 321

Mailing address:
PO Box 18
00014 University of Helsinki
Finland

Maarit Forde has been teaching at the University of Helsinki since 2022.  She was a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West Indies in 2009-2020 and a Research Associate at Newcastle University in 2007-2009. Maarit’s anthropological interests revolve around politics, inequality, religion, health, migration, and colonialism, and she develops multimodal and decolonial methods in her teaching. Maarit has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Caribbean and its diaspora since 1996. Her publications include Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2018) and Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (Duke University Press, 2012).  Maarit’s current project investigates politics in an impoverished neighbourhood in Port of Spain and she is the PI in the project ‘Imagining Futures in the Margins of the State: Everyday Politics in Urban Communities in Trinidad and Zimbabwe’, funded by the Kone Foundation (2024-2026).

Marianna Keisalo

Lecturer

E-mail: marianna.keisalo(at)helsinki.fi

Unioninkatu 35; Room 323
P.O. Box 18
FI-00014  University of Helsinki

Marianna Keisalo received a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki in 2011. She worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University 2016-2018.   

Marianna’s research focuses on the semiotics of comedic performance.  She has done ethnographic research on ritual clowning in Northern Mexico and stand-up comedy in Finland. She also performs stand-up herself. Her research analyses how humor is created and interpreted, and what meanings and efficacy comedy has within broader cultural and social contexts. 

Sarah Green

Professor

E-mail: sarah.green(at)helsinki.fi

tel +358 2941 23009

Unioninkatu 35; Room 318
P.O. Box 18
FI-00014  University of Helsinki

Sarah Green has been a professor at the University of Helsinki since 2012. She currently specializes on the anthropology of location and borders, particularly in the Mediterranean region, with a specialism in the Aegean, Greece and the Greek-Albanian border areas. She particularly studies the significance of where people are located, rather than who or what they are. Over the years, and working with a team of colleagues, she has been developing a different way of thinking about location called ’crosslocations’ (see www.crosslocations.org).

Most recently, she has been working on how livestock, wild animals and infectious diseases are both transported and tracked across borders. She is currently writing a book about that topic, and has already published some articles on the subject (e.g. Green, S. 2022. ‘The Bioeconomics of Domesticating Zoonoses.’ Cultural Anthropology 37 (1): 30–36. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.05. Green, S. 2022. ‘The Hedgehog from Jordan: or, how to locate the movement of wild animals in a partially Mediterranean context.’ In Joseph Viscomi & Carl Rommel, (eds), Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations across Time and Space, Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-18-9 .)

In terms of books, she is author of Notes from the Balkans (Princeton University Press, 2005), Urban Amazons (Macmillan and St Martins Press, 1997), and joint author of Borderwork (JaSilti 2013) with Lena Malm (photography; additional written contributions by Robin Harper and Markus Drake). She is also co-author of a forthcoming book entitled Crosslocations, which has been jointly written by seven researchers: Sarah Green, Samuli Lähteenaho, Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki, Carl Rommel, Joseph Viscomi, Laia Soto Bermant, and Patricia Scalco.

Toomas Gross

Senior Lecturer

Head of discipline

E-mail: toomas.gross(at)helsinki.fi

tel +358 2941 23085

Unioninkatu 35; Room 320
P.O. Box 18
FI-00014  University of Helsinki

Toomas Gross received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2001. He worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, San Diego in 2001-02, and joined the faculty at the University of Helsinki in 2003.

Toomas has done fieldwork in Southern Mexico, focusing mainly on religious change, Protestant-Catholic relations, and religious conversion, but also on tourism and folk medical beliefs. He is currently the PI of the project “The Role of Religion in Contemporary Ethical Self-Making”,  which is a comparative ethnographic study of the techniques of ethical self-fashioning, with a specific focus on how religion intervenes in the constitution of ethics in secular public life, how it contributes to forging ethical subjects, and how it comes to underlie the values and actions that signify exemplary, good life. The project is funded by the Kone Foundation (2019-2024).

Toomas’s other ongoing research focuses on the topics of recreational long-distance running, pain, body, social class, and exercise addiction.

University of Helsinki Research Portal

List of publications

Tuulikki Pietilä

On leave

Timo Kaartinen