Researchers

Viola Parente-Čapková(PhD, Docent) is Professor of Finnish Literature and Director of the Research Centre for Culture and Health at the University of Turku. She is also responsible for the Asklepios education unit, which integrates medical themes with the humanities and social sciences in teaching. Parente-Čapková has published extensively on various themes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Finnish literature from a comparative perspective. She learned Finnish as an adult, having first studied modern philology at Charles University in Prague and later literature in London and Helsinki. Parente-Čapková has wide experience teaching Finnish literature to both first- and second-/foreign-language students in different countries. She was PI of the research project Struck by the Unknown: Fiction as a Promoter of the Finnish Language among Adults with Im/migrant Backgrounds (Kone Foundation, 2020–2023), and she has developed the method of cultural language learning through reading circles for adult learners of Finnish.

Riitta Jytilä(PhD, Docent) is a literary scholar and teacher in the Department of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku. Her main research interests include contemporary Finnish literature, cultural memory, trauma studies, and feminist literary criticism. Her monograph Traumaattinen muisti nykyproosassa (Traumatic Memory in Contemporary Prose Fiction, SKS/FLS, 2022) was the first detailed study of Finnish trauma fiction. Jytilä has also worked as a project researcher and teacher in Struck by the Unknown: Fiction as a Promoter of the Finnish Language among Adults with Im/migrant Backgrounds (Kone Foundation, 2020–2023), where she developed reading circles as a method of cultural language learning for adult immigrants.

Laura Karttunen(PhD) is a university teacher of literary studies at Tampere University. She has developed and researched multidisciplinary approaches to literature pedagogy based on John Dewey’s philosophy. In her dissertation, she examined emotions in narrative structures. She specializes in teaching narrative research to scholars and professionals across disciplines, as well as to the general public (e.g., the edited book Kertomuksen vaarat [Dangers of Narrative, 2020]). Since 2012, she has also taught literature to medical students at Tampere University.

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

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

Elina Renko(PhD, M.Soc.Sc.) is a postdoctoral researcher in social psychology. She currently works in the Health, Narrative and the Arts project at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki and in the Behaviour Change and Well-being research group at Tampere University. She earned her PhD at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on well-being, interaction, agency, motivation, behaviour change, and medical humanities. She has also served 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 at the University of Turku. Her dissertation examines poetics and reading practices in postwar Finnish modernist poetry, with a focus on affectivity. In addition, she works as a Planning Officer at the Research Centre for Culture and Health at the University of Turku.

Alexandra Salmela is a Bratislava-born, Tampere-based writer of adult and children’s fiction who publishes in both Finnish and Slovak. She also works as a translator and moves fluidly between the two languages and cultures. Her most recent book, The Tree, is an environmentally critical allegory about the rise and fall of humankind. Her debut novel 27 or 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 Anasoft Litera Prize in Slovakia, as was her second novel The Antihero. Salmela is interested in languages, externality and otherness, borders of all kinds, and how they can be crossed. She led the writing courses in the project Tuntemattomalla päähän. She holds a degree in theatre dramaturgy from AMDA Bratislava and in Finnish language and literature from Charles University in Prague.

Sonja Sulkava (MD) is a physician specializing in medical genetics, a postdoctoral researcher, and an active contributor to the medical humanities. She teaches narrative medicine in the Health, Narrative and the Arts project at the University of the Arts Helsinki and at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki. She also serves as an editor for the literature section and the culture column “Lääkäri mainittu” in the Finnish Medical Journal. She has participated in the Lux Humana group, the Society for Medical Philosophy, and the Valamo Seminar working group. In 2022, she received the Culture Award of the Finnish Medical Society Duodecim.

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