People
The project team consists of Principal Investigator Dr Charlotta Wolff, postdoctoral researcher Ulla Ijäs, postdoctoral researcher Sophie Holm, doctoral student Elina Maaniitty, Prof. Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen (from 2019) and project researcher Heidi Pitkänen. Read more about us below!
Charlotta Wolff
Fellow (2013–2018) at the University of Helsinki. She earned her doctoral degree in 2005 with a thesis on the Swedish political elite’s relations with eighteenth-century France and French intellectuals in the second half of the eighteenth century. Her book Vänskap och makt. Den svenska politiska eliten och upplysningstidens Frankrike (Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2005) was awarded by the Swedish Academy in 2006. Her second monograph Noble conceptions of politics in eighteenth-century Sweden, ca. 1740–1790 (Finnish Literature Society, 2008) was a study in conceptual and intellectual history. In addition to numerous articles on transfers of ideas and people between Scandinavia and the French cultural sphere, she has also published on nineteenth-century elite identities from an agent’s perspective and on elite cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. After working as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow with the project Comic Opera and Society in France and Northern Europe 1760–1790 (2013–2018), which examines opera as a means of popularising philosophical and political themes, Wolff is acting professor of Finnish history at the University of Turku since August 2018. As the principal investigator of the academy project Agents of Enlightenment: Changing the Minds in Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe she is preparing an extensive study of Swedish ambassador, minister and university chancellor Count Gustav Philip Creutz (1731–1785) as a socialite, freethinker and materialist.
Researcher Profile at University of Helsinki
Researcher Profile at University of Turku
Sophie Holm
Sophie Holm is a postdoctoral researcher and a member of the Academy of Finland research project Agents of Enlightenment. Changing the Minds in Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe. In her doctoral thesis, successfully defended in December 2019 at the University of Helsinki, she examined the practices of early-modern diplomacy through a case study on foreign envoys in Stockholm during the Diet of 1746–1747. The published dissertation was awarded the Mauritz Hallberg Prize of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland 2021. Within the project Agents of Enlightenment Holm has continued her research into to the cultural history of diplomacy in the Baltic Sea area. She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Finnish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies since 2012 and a member of the Executive Committee of the ISECS since 2019.
Elina Maaniitty
Elina Maaniitty is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki. She graduated in 2015 with a master’s thesis on mortality and causes of death in Helsinki during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a subject on which she has also published two refereed articles. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on the prevalence of four epidemic diseases and the measures taken to prevent and combat them in Sweden and Finland during the long eighteenth century. As a member of the Academy of Finland research project Agents of Enlightenment: Changing the Minds in Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe, Maaniitty aims to combine demographic data and historical epidemiology with an analysis of paradigmatic changes in medical thought. Specific areas of interest include the history of smallpox inoculation, the dissemination of new scientific information, and key figures of Swedish medical science of the era.
Researcher Profile at the University of Helsinki
Researcher Profile at the University of Turku
Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen is professor of Finnish history at the University of Turku. In her research, she has gathered strong expertise on economic and gender history, particularly female entrepreneurship and professional work. Professor Vainio-Korhonen is also an expert on digital humanities issues, which are part of her tasks as a vice president of the Advisory council of the Finnish National Archives. Her most recent articles are “Women and Professional Ambitions in Northern Europe, c. 1650–1850” (together with Johanna Ilmakunnas and Marjatta Rahikainen) and “Midwives: Birthing Care Professionals in Eighteenth-Century Sweden and Finland”, both in Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, c. 1650–1850 (Routledge 2017) and “From Household Economy to Family Business” (together with Jarna Heinonen) and “Statutory Invisibility: Urban Business Women’s Legal and Political Rights” (together with Jarkko Keskinen), both in Women in Business Families from Past to Present (Routledge 2018). She has also published a monograph in Swedish on the eighteenth-century midwifery, De frimodiga: Barnmorskor, födande och kroppslighet på 1700-talet (SLS 2016). In the Agents project, Vainio-Korhonen focuses on the place of formal knowledge in the training of midwives, who became public office holders, and on midwives as purveyors of new knowledge.
kuva: Mikael Korhonen
Ulla Ijäs (Dr. Phil.) is Docent of Finnish history and a post doctoral researcher at the University of Turku. She finished her Finnish history doctoral thesis at the School of history, Culture and Arts Studies at the University of Turku in 2015. Her research interests are urban elites, material culture, gender history and economic and social history prior the Industrial Revolution. In her latest research articles she has focused on the urban elite family strategies in ‘ German families and their family strategies. Marriage and education in the eighteenth- and the nineteenth-century provincial towns in the northern Baltic’ in Ulla Aatsinki, Johanna Annola and Mervi Kaarninen (eds.), Families, Values, and the Transfer of Knowledge in Northern Societies, 1500–2000 (Routledge 2018) and female entrepreneurship in ‘Marie Hackman – The female manager in the family firm Hackman & Co’ in Jarna Heinonen and Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen (eds.). Women in Business Families: From Past to Present, Gender in Business Families (Routledge 2018). In Agents project she will study merchant elite and their access to knowledge and their information networks. Especially, she will focus on the merchant house Ignatius & Hackman (later Hackman & Co) which operated in the Baltic timber trade from the 1790s.
Researcher Profile at the University of Turku
Kuva: Maria Syväniemi
Heidi Pitkänen
Heidi Pitkänen (MA) works as a project researcher for the Agents project at the University of Turku. She graduated in 2020 with a master’s thesis on autobiographical writing of Swedish crown official, explorer and trader Carl von Hauswolff (1791–1843) and is currently working on a research plan for her doctoral thesis. Pitkänen is interested in the cultural history of the Baltic Sea area in the 18th and 19th centuries and has focused on the history of the elites, travel and exploration, colonialism and the history of life writing in her previous research.