Researchers

Viola Parente-Čapková (PhD, Adjunct Professor) is Professor of Finnish literature, literary scholar and teacher, director of Research Centre for Culture and Health, responsible also for the Asklepios education unit, which combines medical themes with humanities and social sciences in teaching. Parente-Čapková’s has published extensively on various themes from 19th and 20th century Finnish literature in comparative perspective. She learned Finnish as an adult, having studied modern philology in Charles University, Prague, and later literature in London and Helsinki. Parente-Čapková has got large experience in teaching Finnish literature to both first and second/foreign language students in different countries. She was PI in the Research Project Struck by the Unknown: Fiction as a promoter of the Finnish language among adults with im/migrant background (Kone Foundation 2020–2023), and developed the method of cultural language learning in reading circles for adult learners of Finnish.

Riitta Jytilä (PhD, Adjunct Professor) is a literary scholar and a teacher at the Department of Finnish Literature, University of Turku. Her main research interests include Finnish contemporary literature, cultural memory and trauma studies and feminist literary criticism. Her monograph Traumaattinen muisti nykyproosassa (Traumatic Memory in Contemporary Prose Fiction, SKS/FLS) came out in 2022 and was the first study to examine Finnish trauma fiction in detail. Jytilä has also worked as a project researcher and as a teacher in Struck by the Unknown: Fiction as a promoter of the Finnish language among adults with im/migrant background (Kone Foundation 2020–2023). In the project, she developed the reading circle as a method of cultural language learning for adult immigrants.

Laura Karttunen (PhD) works as a university teacher of literary studies at Tampere University. She has developed and researched multidisciplinary literature pedagogy based on John Dewey’s philosophy. In her dissertation, she examined emotions in narrative structures. She specializes in teaching narrative research to representatives of different disciplines and professional groups as well as for the general public (e.g. edited book Kertomuksen vaarat (2020)), and she has taught literature to medical students at Tampere University since 2012.

Niina Kekki (MA) is a Finnish teacher and doctoral researcher. Her doctoral dissertation examines the language use of advanced level learners of Finnish by using the methods of corpus linguistics. In addition, she has conducted research on linguistically and culturally aware teaching, multilingual pedagogy and the use of the reading circle method in Finnish teaching. She has worked at the University of Turku as a Finnish as a foreign language teacher, as a university teacher of language aware teaching, and as a project researcher in projects funded by the Kone Foundation.

Anna Ovaska (PhD, M.Soc.Sc.) is a literature scholar and a teacher. Her research is situated in the intersections of narrative studies, medical humanities, feminist and queer theory, and embodied cognitive research. Her previous project Reading Pain (Kone Foundation) examined narrative representations of pain and their reading from critical and embodied perspectives, and her recent publications include the monograph Shattering Minds: Experiences of Mental Illness in Modernist Finnish Literature (SKS, 2023). Anna has been a Fulbright scholar in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, and she has taught narrative medicine and literature in Finland at the University of Turku, Tampere University and University of Helsinki.

Elina Renko (PhD, M.Soc.Sc.) is a postdoctoral researcher in social psychology. Currently she works in the Health, Narrative and the Arts -project at the Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Further, she works in the Behaviour change and wellbeing -research group at the University of Tampere and has a PhD from the University of Helsinki. Her research revolves around well-being, interaction, agency, motivation, behaviour change and medical humanities. She has worked as an expert in qualitative methods and methodologies in various multidisciplinary mixed-methods research projects.

Carita Roivas (MA) is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Finnish Literature, University of Turku. Her doctoral dissertation examines poetics and ways of reading around Finnish post-war modernist poetry by focusing on affectivity. In addition, she works as Planning Officer in the Research Centre for Culture and Health in the University of Turku.

Alexandra Salmela is Bratislava born and Tampere based writer of adult and children’s fiction who publishes both in Finnish and Slovak and translates, lives and moves between the two languages and countries. Her latest work The Tree is an environmentally critical fable allegory about the rise and fall of humankind. Her debut novel 27 or The Death makes an Artist (2010) was awarded the Helsingin Sanomat Debut of the year and was nominated for the Finlandia prize in Finland and the AnasoftLitera prize in Slovakia, as was her second novel The Antihero. AS is interested in language/s, externality and otherness, borders of all kinds and overstepping them. She was in charge of the writing courses for the Tuntemattomalla päähän -project. AS has a degree in theater dramaturgy from AMDA Bratislava and in Finnish language and literature from Charles University in Prague.

Sonja Sulkava is physician specializing in medical genetics, post doc researcher, as well as active in medical humanities. She is a teacher in the Health, Narrative and the Arts -project at the University of the Arts Helsinki, and in the course for narrative medicine in the Medical Faculty of the University of Helsinki. She works as an editor for the literature section and the culture section “Lääkäri mainittu” in the Finnish Medical Journal. She participated in the Lux Humana group, in the society for medical philosophy, and in the Valamo seminar working group. In 2022, she was awarded with the Culture award by the Finnish Medical Society Duodecim.

Jussi Valtonen (PhD) is a novelist and professor of writing at the Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts Helsinki. He has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Helsinki and an MA in film screenwriting from the University of Salford (UK). He was a visiting Fulbright graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting postdoctoral scholar at New York University in the USA. His research interests include intuitive theories of the mind and the brain, social cognition of mental illness, and mental health humanities. He leads the Health, Narrative and the Arts initiative at the University of the Arts. His most recent novel, They Know Not What They Do, won the Finlandia Prize and has been translated into ten different languages.