INTERACT MEMBERS

Dr Kaisa Ilmonen (PI) is a tenured University Lecturer at the department of Comparative Literature, University of Turku, and holds the title of docent in Minority Literatures. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2012, was titled “Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff. Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity”. Ilmonen has published substantially on the topics of intersectionality, postcolonial studies, Caribbean women’s writing, and queer studies, in journals such as Signs, Ariel, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Journal of Literary Theory. Currently, she is Principal Investigator of the research project INTERACT funded by KONE foundation. Contact: kailmo@utu.fi

Dr Kaiju Harinen received her PhD in French from the University of Turku in 2018, with a thesis on francophone literature, intersectionality and performativity in the semiautobiographical writings of the West African authors Calixthe Beyala and Ken Bugul. After obtaining her doctorate, she has been working as a university teacher at the French departments of the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University and at the University of Helsinki. Harinen has also been working for an anti-racist and cooperative NGO based in Dakar and in Helsinki. Her post-doctoral research project combines intersectionality, feminist storytelling, discourse analysis applied to literature, and anti-racist and anti-discriminatory reading circles. Contact: kmhari@utu.fi

Dr Marta-Laura Cenedese works as experienced researcher at the University of Turku and is associate researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin. She studied at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari and Sciences-Po Paris before completing a PhD in French and comparative literature at the University of Cambridge. Marta is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century postcolonial literatures, the interlacing of literature, history and politics, cultural memory studies, critical theory, critical medical humanities, death studies, and feminist writing methodologies. She edited the special issue ‘Connective Histories of Death’ (Thanatos 9:2, 2020, with Samira Saramo), the volume Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) (Logos Verlag Berlin, in press), and is the author of several articles and the monograph Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Contact: mlcene@utu.fi 

Anastasia (A) Khodyreva is a transdisciplinary researcher currently based in the Gender Studies Department, University of Turku. Dwelling between academic and artistic research practices, they work with methods of haptic encounters, sound walks, multisensorial writing and communal reading where intersectionality is a practice of reading- and listening-with each other and an ever-nascent milieu. Their most recent communal reading project unfolded within Aquatic Encounters: Arts and Hydrofeminisms (Kone Foundation 2020 – 2022, co-facilitated with PhD Elina Suoyrjö), a research project and communal reading space that dream of aqueous companionships and just multispecies futures. Contact: anakho@utu.fi; awaitingbody@gmail.com

Koko Hubara is a doctoral student at the department of comparative literature, University of Turku. Her research is focused on the question of daughterhood and daughtering as a political position in society, as well as daughter-mother relationships of white mothers and daughters of color as intimate sites where intersections and implications of race and gender come to life. In her research, Hubara studies memoirs and life-writing groups. Before her doctoral studies, Hubara has worked around questions of race, class, daughters, mothering and intersectional feminism in the Finnish context, her media being essays, fiction, translating and teaching creative writing. Contact: smhuba@utu.fi

Lotta Luhtala is a Ph.D. Researcher and Grant Researcher at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku. In her forthcoming dissertation she has developed an intersectional and activist reading method and theory called the vegan readership. She is interested in how veganism, non-human animals, gender and the environment are intersectionally connected in Finnish and international narrative fiction and, for example, how to read through values of veganism to render visible the often-silenced trauma of vegans and non-human animals. Her fields of expertise are vegan studies, critical animal studies, narrative theory and ecofeminism. Luhtala has worked in The Changing Environment of the North project (2017–2021), and received two personal grants from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Currently she is a grantee in the Romaanintieto -project (2022–2024, funded by Kone Foundation). Luhtala was one of the original members of the INTERACT-project. Contact: lotta.h.luhtala@utu.fi

Liisa Merivuori (she/they) is a doctoral researcher in the department of comparative literature at the University of Turku. Her research is focused on contemporary trauma fiction, intersectionally reading narratives of trauma, and the effects trauma has on a person’s narrative identity. She is interested in how different types of trauma, especially traumas related to discrimination and structural violence, are described in modern literature and how trauma fiction can help readers understand the private and cultural traumas of our own reality. Her doctoral research is funded by Kone Foundation. Contact: lianme@utu.fi