Researchers
Hanna Meretoja
The Principal Investigator of the project, Hanna Meretoja, is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland). She has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and Exeter College, University of Oxford (2019-2020 and spring 2023). Her research is mainly in the field of interdisciplinary narrative studies. She has developed the theory of narrative agency that is used in the project Counter-Narratives of Cancer. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford University Press) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), and she has co-edited, with Mark Freeman, The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (2023, Oxford University Press), with Colin Davis, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (2018, Routledge), with Eneken Laanes, the special issue of Memory Studies (“Cultural Memorial Forms”, 2021), and, with Maria Mäkelä, the special issue of Poetics Today (“Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom”, 2022). Her novel Elotulet (2022, WSOY, The Night of Ancient Lights), also deals with issues of narrativizing cancer. https://hannameretojanet.wordpress.com/
Astrid Joutseno/Swan
Dr. Astrid Joutseno/Swan is the Kone Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Arts at the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies from September 2023 until August 2024. In her postdoctoral research project Joutseno/Swan inspects grief as a cultural affect. This research started in January 2023 with funding from Alfred Kordelin Foundation. In Counter-narratives of Cancer, Joutseno researches the grief of the dying and cancer-related grief. Instead of the context of care and carework, she approaches grief as experience, in a corpus of life-writing (digital, memoir, literary). Recognizing grief in the research material requires becoming interpretively sensitive because often expressions of grief are quiet, secondary, concealed and surreptitious. Joutseno/Swan develops concepts for better engagement with the grief of the dying. The aim is to better understand how grief is expressed and created by those dying and those who live with an incurable illness. In her doctoral dissertation Life Writing from Birth to Death: How M/others Know (2021), Joutseno/Swan presented the concept of illness as ability, which we will develop further in this project. As a songwriter-musician Astrid Swan has addressed both grief and living with cancer in her album From the Bed and Beyond (2017), which won the Teosto-award in 2018; in her latest album D/other (2021); and her Finnish-language memoir Viimeinen kirjani: kirjoituksia elämästä (2019). https://astridswan.blog/
Markku Lehtimäki
Dr. Markku Lehtimäki is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. His fields of expertise are narrative theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, and American literature. His research projects include The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water (2017–2021), funded by the Academy of Finland, and The Novel’s Knowledge: Changing Roles of Author and Book in Society (2022–2024), funded by the Kone Foundation. He is the author of The Poetics of Norman Mailer’s Nonfiction: Self-Reflexivity, Literary Form, and the Rhetoric of Narrative (Tampere University Press 2005) and Sofi Oksasen romaanitaide: Kertomus, etiikka, retoriikka (“The Art of Sofi Oksanen’s Novels: Narrative, Ethics, Rhetoric”, SKS 2022) and co-editor of several books, including Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature (De Gruyter 2012) and Visual Representations of the Arctic: Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics (Routledge 2021). He has also written articles on fictional and non-fictional illness narratives.
Päivi Kosonen
Dr. Päivi Kosonen is adjunct professor of comparative literature at the University of Turku, a bibliotherapist and bibliotherapeutic educator. She is an expert in bibliotherapy and reading group research (e.g. Kosonen 2019; Meretoja, Kinnunen & Kosonen 2022). In the project, she is responsible for bibliotherapeutic groups for patients and health personnel at the hospitals and the collaboration with the Finnish Association for Bibliotherapy. https://ajatusmatka.fi/ajatusmatka-in-english/
Eevastiina Kinnunen
MA Eevastiina Kinnunen is a doctoral researcher at the University of Turku and a bibliotherapy facilitator. She is specialised in reading group research. Kinnunen is currently writing her PhD on reading groups, narrative well-being, and narrative agency (funded by The Emil Aaltonen Foundation). Her recent publications approach reading groups from various perspectives, see for example “Narrative Agency and the Critical Potential of Metanarrative Reading Groups” (Meretoja, Kinnunen & Kosonen 2022). Kinnunen also works as a bibliotherapy facilitator and creative writing instructor. She will start her postdoctoral research in this project.
Photos: Hanna Meretoja, photo by Maria Grönroos. Astrid Joutseno/Swan, photo by Tekla Vály.