Speakers

 

Natalya Bekhta is Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Finland) where she works on a book project called “After Utopia: A World-Literary Reconstruction of the ‘Second World'”. Her recent publications include a monograph, We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction (2020; winner of Perkins Prize 2021), and a special issue of Style on “We-Narratives and We-Discourses across Genres” (54.1, 2020). She can be reached at natalya.bekhta@helsinki.fi. 

Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and Adjunct Professor of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne. During his academic trajectory, he has been affiliated with universities in Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Uruguay. His work has focused on globalization, migration, the body, gender and sexuality, and utopia, and he has conducted field research in the Pacific Islands, Japan, and the United States. He was editor of the journal American Ethnologist from 2015 to 2019. In 2019–20, he enjoyed a year as fellow at the Helsinki Collegium. 

Yves Gingras is Professor of history and sociology of science and Scientific Director of the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST) at Université du Québec à Montréal. He has published extensively on the transformation of universities and scientific research as well as on scientific collaborations and interdisciplinarity. His recent books are Sociologie des sciences (PUF, 2020) and Science and Religion. An Impossible Dialogue (Polity Press, 2017). He has also co-edited L’expérimentation dans les sciences (Matérologiques, 2022). 

Christine Helmer is Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities, Professor of German and Religious Studies at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, USA. Her area of specialization is the theology of Christianity from historical and constructive perspectives. She has published extensively on Luther and Luther’s reception in German thought, theology and the study of religion, German intellectual history, the philosophy and theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and contemporary theology. She was Marie Curie EURIAS Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies in 2012-2103 and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Helsinki from 2017. Her most recent book is How Luther Became the Reformer (2019) and edited volume is Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance (2021). She is currently completing a book on constructive theology and co-authoring a book (with Amy Carr) on justification and justice. 

Monika Krause is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. She is interested in expert practices and the social organization of specialization. She is the author of “The Good Project. Humanitarian NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason” (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014) and “Model Cases. On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2021). She was a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2016-2017. 

Maria Kuteeva is professor of English linguistics at Stockholm University and a former Erik Allardt Fellow at HCAS. She received her PhD (1999) in English from the University of Manchester. Over the last decade, her research has focused on academic discourse analysis and explored how English is used in multilingual university settings. Her publications have engaged with scholarly debates surrounding ontologies and roles of English in the world. Maria’s work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals, e.g. Applied LinguisticsEnglish for Specific PurposesJournal of Second Language WritingHigher Education, and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Recent books include Language perceptions and practices in multilingual universities (2020, Palgrave Macmillan, with Kaufhold and Hynninen) and Tension-filled English at the multilingual university: A Bakhtinian perspective (forthcoming, Multilingual Matters). She serves on the editorial boards of several international journals and is co-editor-in-chief of Revista Ibérica. 

James Mittelman is Distinguished Research Professor and University Professor Emeritus at American University. He s also Honorary Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and was named a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Previously, he held the Pok Rafeah Chair at the National University of Malaysia and has had teaching and research appointments in Japan, Mozambique, South Africa, and Uganda. The recipient of the International Studies Association’s Distinguished Scholar award in International Political Economy, Mittelman is the author or editor of 13 books, including The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance (Princeton University Press), Hyperconflict: Globalization and Insecurity (Stanford University Press), and Implausible Dream: The World-Class University and Repurposing Higher Education (Princeton University Press). Currently, he is writing a book tentatively titled Runaway Capitalism: the Greatest Pandemic.

Britta Padberg coordinates the Fellowship Program of the newly founded Academy of International Affairs in Bonn. Between 2008 and 2020 she was the Managing Director of the Center for interdisciplinary Research (Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung ZiF). During a sabbatical in 2017/18, she traveled to IASs in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and the U.S. and conducted the first systematic study of these institutes worldwide. She published the results in the article The Global Diversity of Institutes for Advanced Study in the journal Sociologica in 2020. 

She is an biological anthropologist and historian by education and received her PhD at Göttingen University. In former positions she was concerned with fostering high-gifted students for the Cusanuswerk (Bonn) and with organizing the Excellence Initiative for the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat Köln). 

Kristina Rolin is University Lecture in Research Ethics at Tampere University and former HCAS Core Fellow. Besides research ethics, her areas of specialty are philosophy of science and social science, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology. She is interested in the role of values in research, objectivity, epistemic responsibility, diversity in sciences, collective knowledge, and trust in science. 

Sanjay Seth is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written extensively on postcolonial theory, social and political theory, and modern Indian history, including Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: Colonial India (Sage, 1995), Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Duke University Press 2007, and Oxford University Press India 2008) and  Beyond Reason: Postcolonial Theory and the Social Sciences (NY: Oxford University Press 2020; Indian edition with OUP India, 2021) and two collections of essays translated from English into Portuguese, Humanidades, Universalismo e diferença histórica, (Editora Milfontes 2021)and História e Pós-colonialismo, (Imprensa de História Contemporânea, 2022). He was a founding editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies from 1998-2020. 

José Filipe Silva is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Fellow at the HCAS (2011-2014), Director of the ERC project Rationality in Perception: Transformations of Mind and Cognition 1250-1550 (2015-2020), currently leads the AoF project Augustinian Natural Philosophy at Oxford and Paris ca. 1277 (2020-2024). His area of expertise is on Medieval Philosophy, and he is the author and editor of among others Robert Kilwardby (OUP 2020), The Senses in the History of Philosophy (Routledge 2019), Active Perception in the History of Philosophy from Plato to Kant (Springer 2014), Dictatorship of failure: the discourse of democratic failure in the current European crisis (COLLeGIUM 2013).

 

Henning Trüper (PhD EUI Florence), is a historian with interests in European cultural and intellectual histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically the history of the humanities and of humanitarianism. He was a postdoc at the University of Zurich and EHESS, Paris, a member at IAS Princeton, lecturer and adjunct lecturer at Technische Universität Berlin, and Core Fellow at HCAS 2016-19. He now works at Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, where he is PI of the ERC project “Archipelagic Imperatives: Lifesaving and Shipwreck in European Societies since 1800”. Publications include: Topography of a Method: Francois Louis Ganshof and the Writing of History (Tübingen 2014), Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World (London 2020), and, edited with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (London 2015). 

Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen (PhD in Latin American Studies) is Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her current research interests include long-term human-environment relationality in the Amazon, epistemological pluralism, and decolonization of the Anthropocene. Her publications include numerous monographs, edited books and articles on Amazonian biocultural landscapes, Indigenous politics and leadership, human–environment interactions, mobility, and youthhood. Virtanen is the author of Indigenous Youth in Brazilian Amazonia: Changing Lived Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and co-editor of Creating Dialogues: Indigenous Perceptions and Changing Forms of Leadership in Amazonia (Colorado University Press, 2017) and Indigenous Research Methodologies in Sámi and Global Contexts (Brill, 2021). 

Ole Wæver is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen and founder of the research centers CAST (Centre for Advanced Security Theory) and CRIC (Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts). He coined the concept of ‘securitization’ and co-developed what is known as the Copenhagen School in security studies. Beyond security theory, his research interests include conflict analysis and conflict resolution, the history and sociology of the International Relations discipline, sociology of science, religion in international relations, climate change, politics of technology, conceptual history, and speech act theory. He has directed various research projects including currently ‘Human Rights and Peace Building’ and ‘Militarisation in Uganda’. He was on defense commissions and various other policy advisory bodies on security, climate and research policy; member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters; honorary doctorate from the University of Turku. Knighted.