Pricipal Investigator:

Dr. Olga A. Simonova is a Researcher at the School of History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Turku, Finland. She has worked in the field of literary and gender studies for 20 years. Her research interests include Russian literature of the early 20th century, mass literature, children’s literature, women’s magazines, and the representation of women in literature about World War I and the Russian Civil War. She is the author of 80 scholarly publications.

Members of the project:

Arja Rosenholm, PhD, is Professor emerita of Russian Language and Culture at Tampere University, Finland. Her fields of scholarship are Russian literature and culture, gender studies, memory studies and ecocriticism including space studies. Her latest publications include such coedited volumes as Naisia Venäjän kulttuurihistoriassa (Women in Russian Cultural history, Gaudeamus, 2014), Out of the USSR. Travelling Women – Travelling Memory (De Gruyter, 2025) and Liikkuvat tekstit, liikkuvat naiset Suomen, Venäjän ja Neuvostoliiton kirjallisella kentällä (SKS 2025).

Marja Sorvari, PhD, is Professor of Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research explores transnational literature, women’s writing, gender and cultural memory, and literary translation. She is the author of Displacement and (Post)memory in Post-Soviet Women’s Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and co-editor (with Eva Hausbacher, Viola Parente-Čapková, and Arja Rosenholm) of Out of the USSR: Travelling Women, Travelling Memories (De Gruyter, 2025).

Eeva Kuikka, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher specializing in Indigenous cultures and decolonial activism in the context of Russia. Kuikka’s doctoral research addressed human-animal relations in Indigenous literatures of the Soviet North and her post-doctoral research explores the intersections of gender and ethnicity in 20th -Century and contemporary Russian-language literature, art, and digital media. Kuikka’s latest publications is the monograph Human-Animal Relations in Indigenous Literatures of the Soviet North, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.

Tamara Polyakova is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. She is completing a dissertation on the role non-human actors played in warfare in Russian Karelia (1918-22). Her most recent article entitled “’Russian’ Cold. Karelian Nature, Emotional Belonging, and the Missing Myth of the North” in A Frozen State. Experiencing Cold in Russian History and Culture, is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press.

Tatu Laukkanen, PhD, is a film scholar and industry professional affiliated with Tampere University. He has been researching war films for more than a decade, with the most recent article ”A Double-Edged Sword? Nationalist blockbusters of China and Russia” published in Geopolitics and Culture: Narrating Eastern European and Eurasian Worlds. He teaches courses and has published on Chinese, Russian and Asian Cinema.

 

Image: Ambulance cars in the village of Barysh, July 1, 1916. Private collection.