Back at Tampere!

From 1 August I’m back at Tampere as a university lecturer in comparative literature,  after three years on research leave.

(source: tampere.fi)

Much has changed at Tampere: new university, new faculty, new study information systems… The main task remains much the same: to teach, to do research, to provide guidance to students, to collaborate with colleagues and to do all of that in ways that interact with broader society.

Very much looking forward to continue collaboration with old colleagues and to get to know new ones.

After years focusing on research, I’m particularly looking forward also to teach and to reconnect with our students. Unfortunately, teaching will be online for the rest of the year 2020 – hopefully we can get back to normal contact teaching as soon as possible in 2021.

In terms of research, I will continue finalizing my project on the futures of coastal cities across genres (more here), with a number of articles coming up and hopeful a monograph taking shape in the year to come.

Other things I hope to work on include explorations of utopia and hope in literature; questions of agency in terms of networked urbanities; the genre of the city novel; the development of methods and approaches in literary urban studies.

I would like to end this blog post by thanking the University of Turku and the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies for their support these past three years. TIAS was the perfect place to focus on research over a longer period of time. Among many other things, the support of TIAS enabled me to go on extensive research trips, to spend half a year as visiting professor at the KU Leuven, Belgium, to organize various events, to invite colleagues, and to connect with a wide range of fascinating researchers working on the most diverse topics. More than anything else, TIAS allowed me to focus for a long and uninterrupted time and without too many distractions on one particular research project, and to think through the implications of that project.