Research team

Charlotta Wolff (PhD) is professor of Finnish history and leader of the project. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Northern European elites, Enlightenment culture and cosmopolitan identities. As a cultural and intellectual historian, she is interested in identities and social practices, circulations and transfers, conceptual history, and poetry and music as sources for historical research. As an Academy of Finland research fellow in 2013–2018, she examined the role of French opéra-comique in the development of eighteenth-century public opinion and political identities in France and Scandinavia from the perspective of Copenhagen and Stockholm. In the project Opera in the periphery? Åbo and Paris as musical and theatrical capitals, 1790–1840, she takes the question of how musical and theatrical life contributed to the birth of a bourgeois public sphere and new civic ideals further by analysing the artistic interactions between a European metropolis and a regional centre from the viewpoint of entangled history and the circulation of ideas.
Research profile and publications
Contact: charlotta.wolff@utu.fi

Topi Artukka (PhD) is a post-doctoral researcher specialised in the study of bourgeois society, sociability and the cultural history of nineteenth-century elites. He is particularly interested in questions related to social interaction and the formation of hierarchies, spatiality, social customs and urban communities. In his research, he uses private personal materials, such as diaries and memoirs, as well as sources produced by public institutions. In the project Opera in the periphery?, he explores the connection between sociability and theatre and examines the early theatre institution that emerged in Åbo, its spatial dimensions and how it was experienced from the perspective of the cosmopolitan social life of the bourgeoisie.
Research profile and publications
Contact: topart@utu.fi

Johanna Ilmakunnas (PhD) is a historian of material culture, family and gender in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sweden and Finland and professor of Nordic history at Åbo Akademi University. Her research interests span from everyday practices and experiences to microhistory. She combines textual sources such as egodocuments and account books with visual sources and artefacts. In the project Opera in the periphery?, she explores the material, gendered and cultural history of artistic work.
Research profile and publications
Contact: johanna.ilmakunnas@abo.fi

Mikko Saira (MA) is a research assistant and project researcher. In 2024, he finalised his master’s thesis on charity concerts arranged by the Turku Musical Society in 1790–1808. The main argument of the thesis is that charity concerts, which were part of the bourgeois public sphere, helped to create the sense of unity among the bourgeois audience in Turku, and thus defined what kind of people were part of the bourgeois community. From January 2025 onwards, Saira will work as a doctoral researcher in the project Opera in the periphery? with a thesis on the circulation of music in Northern Europe 1790–1840.
Research profile and publications
Contact: mivasa@utu.fi

Heidi Tähtinen (MA) is a doctoral researcher at the University of Turku and Université d’Aix-Marseille. To the project Opera in the periphery? they bring the history of a celebrated librettist Constance de Salm (1767–1845) and her Parisian literary circles in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
Research profile and publications
Contact: heidi.tahtinen@utu.fi