WP1: Literary history
email: kati.launis@uef.fi
telephone: +358 400 460 55
Kati Launis is a Professor of Literature at the University of Eastern Finland. She is a specialist of digital literary studies and 19th century literary history, and the PI in the project Digital History for Literature in Finland (2022-26, SA). Launis is the author of Kerrotut naiset. Suomen ensimmäiset naisten kirjoittamat romaanit naiseuden määrittelijöinä (Narrated Women: The First Novels Written by Women in Finland Defining Womanhood, 2005) and Kynän kantama elämä. Kirjoittavat Hiiskun sisaret (2017), the biography of three writing sisters Aune, Helka and Kyllikki Hiisku. She has also written several articles on Finnish working-class writers, 19th century female writers, cultural meanings of illness, Gothic Fiction, and a figure of the child in Finnish realist literature. Lately she has studied the reading culture in contemporary Finland in the multidisciplinary Research Consortium LibDat: Towards a More Advanced Loaning and Reading Culture and its Information Service (Academy of Finland, 2017–2021).
Veli-Matti Pynttäri, PhD
e-mail: veli-matti.pynttari@uef.fi
The specialty of Pynttäri includes essay literature, interwar literary history in Finland, and questions related to the genre. Pynttäri completed his doctoral dissertation on the cultural-critical production of T. Vaaskivi (1912-1942) and conducted postdoctoral research in a project funded by the Kone Foundation titled “Essays in Crisis” (2013-2016). He has also written about working class literature in the context of the 1930s, with a particular focus on the works of Toivo Pekkanen and Raoul Palmgren. Currently, in addition to digital methods, Pynttäri is interested in 19th-century literature and book history, as well as theoretical and historical questions related to reading. Pynttäri has taught Finnish language and literature in high school and currently serves as an expert member of the Matriculation Examination Board. In 2018, he was a member of the selection committee for the Runeberg Prize, and the following year, Veli-Matti served as a member of the prize committee. In 2022, Pynttäri chaired the selection committee for the Finlandia Prize in Fiction.
Prof. Viola Parente-Čapkováe-mail: viocap@utu.fi
Parente-Čapková is specialized in Finnish literature of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in an international, especially European context, literature written by women, literary history and its theory, philology and digital literary studies. She has also researched broadly understood literary reception, representations of marginalized groups and Romani literature, and cultural learning of language through literature. She has taught at various European universities and worked in the HERA-funded research project Traveling TexTs. Currently, she works as a professor of Finnish literature at the University of Turku, she is the Chair of the DARIAH-EU Women Writers in History Working Group, and the PI of the research projects Texts on the Move: Reception of Women Writers in Finland and Russia 1840–2020 (Emil Aaltonen Foundation) and “Struck by the Unknown? Fiction as a Promoter of the Finnish language among adults with im/migrant background” (Kone Foundation).
University Lecturer Aino Mäkikalli
e-mail: ainmak@utu.fi
Aino Mäkikalli is a University Lecturer at the University of Turku. She is the author of From Eternity to Time. Conceptions of Time in Daniel Defoe’s Novels (2007), and the co-editor of several collections of articles dealing with the eighteenth-century literature and history and theory of the novel, such as Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature (2017), Romaanin historian ja teorian kytköksiä [Connections between history and theory of the novel] (2013), and Positioning Daniel Defoe’s Non-Fiction: Form, Function, Genre (2011). In recent years, Mäkikalli has studied literature education and examined theoretical questions related to reading literature. Mäkikalli was the director of a project funded by Kone Foundation, How to read? Forms of reading in literature education in the upper secondary school. Mäkikalli serves as an expert member of the International Baccalaureate Organization and the Matriculation Examination Board in Finland.