University of Helsinki
The principle investigator and co-applicants for this workshop series include scholars at various stages of their careers from Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. Get to know them here!
PI, DR. JANNE LAHTI / University OF HELSINKI
Dr Janne Lahti works at the University of Helsinki, Finland, as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow. He has also taught at the University of Arizona and recently at Free University Berlin. He has been awarded the Fulbright Fellowship, Huntington Library’s Mayers Fellowship, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Distinguished Visiting Fellowship in Perth, Australia. His research focuses on global and transnational histories of settler colonialism, borderlands, the American West, and Nordic colonialism.
He has published six books, including German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World: Entangled Empires (Palgrave, 2021), Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film, with Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Routledge, 2020), The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019) and Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).
CO-APPLICANT, PH.D. Linda Andersson Burnett / UPPSALA UNIVERSITY
Dr Linda Andersson Burnett is a Wallenberg Academy Fellow and Researcher at the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on the exchange of scientific and cultural thought between Britain and Scandinavia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the importance of colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples in the development of these exchanges. In her previous position, at the Linnaeus University, she convened an interdisciplinary research group on Nordic Colonialism.
She is the author of numerous articles on Sámi history, Linnaean natural history and ethnographic shows. She is also the co-editor of a special issue on Nordic Colonialism for Scandinavian Studies (2019).
linda.andersson-burnett@idehist.uu.se
CO-APPLICANT, PROFESSOR Gunlög Fur / Linnaeus University
Gunlög Fur is a professor of History at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Publications include Colonialism in the Margins. Cultural Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland (2006), Painting Culture, Painting Nature – Stephen Mopope, Oscar Jacobson and the Development of Indian Art in Oklahoma (2019). Edited in 2020, together with John Hennessey, a special issue on “Sweden and colonialism” for Historisk Tidskrift. Research focuses on colonial encounters, indigenous studies, Native American, Sámi, gender, and the concurrent and entangled histories of Scandinavian immigrants and Native Americans.
CO-APPLICANT, Post-doc John Hennessey / UPPSALA UNIVERSITY
John Hennessey is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University. His dissertation, Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868-1912 (Linnaeus University, 2018), was shortlisted for the 2019 ICAS Dissertation Prize in Asian studies and received an honorable mention for the 2020 Walter Markov Prize in global history.
He has published articles in journals including Japan Review, French Colonial History, Settler Colonial Studies and History Compass. His current research focuses on depictions of the Ainu people in Western race science between the Meiji Restoration and the Second World War.
CO-APPLICANT, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR rinna kullaa / TAMPERE UNIVERSITY
Rinna Kullaa is an Associate Professor of Global History at Tampere University. She is the leader of the four-year Academy of Finland sponsored project investigating the history of non-hegemony and non-hegemonic foreign policies in modern history. She graduated from Birkerød Gymnasium in Denmark and is a native of Finland while her academic career has spanned universities in Paris, New York, Vienna, Antananarivo, and Oxford among others.
Her latest publications include The Soviet Union’s Global Ports and Flexible Web-like Naval Strategy: Case studies of Antsiranana and Tivat International Journal of Maritime History 33(1)2021 pp.209-231 and Rethinking Southern Europe: Society, Networks and Politics. Contemporary European History 26(2)2021 pp. 1-10.
CO-APPLICANT, PROFESSOR Kristín Loftsdóttir / UNIVERSITY OF ICELAND
Kristín Loftsdóttir is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland. Her research has focused on migration, whiteness, gender, racism, Nordic exceptionalism, postcolonialism and crisis, basing on work in Iceland, Niger and Belgium. Loftsdóttir is currently leading the project Creating Europe through Racialized Mobility (CERM), funded by the Icelandic Center of Research and has actively participated in multiple international projects.
Loftsdóttir’s forthcoming publications are Exceptionalism (co-authored, Routledge 2021), We are all African here: Race, Mobilities and West Africans in Europe (Berghahn 2021). Other recent publication include the monograph Crisis and Coloniality at Europe’s Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland (Routledge, 2019) and the co-edited books Messy Europe: Crisis, Race and Nation State in a Postcolonial World (Berghahn, 2018) and Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region (Routledge, 2012).
STUDENT ASSISTANT, LOTTA VUORIO / UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI
Lotta Vuorio is a PhD researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD project, Moving Bodies – Materiality, Senses, and Exercising in the Late Nineteenth-Century England (2020–2024), examines the embodied experiences of exercising and moving one’s body in the Victorian era. She produces a Finnish, history-themed podcast called Menneisyyden Jäljillä (On the track of the past), and is interested in the way historical knowledge is represented and popularised.