HEX Board || Visiting Scholars || Forthcoming Visiting Scholars
HEX Members
Pirjo Markkola
Director of HEX 2022-, Lived Welfare State Team Leader
Pirjo Markkola is professor of history specialized in gender history, history of children and childhood, and the history of Lutheranism and the welfare state in the Nordic countries. She is in charge of theme group Lived welfare state. Markkola’s own research focuses on the experiences of justice and injustice in child welfare. Another theme central to her research is lived religion and the Nordic welfare state.
Pertti Haapala
Director of HEX 2018-2021
Pertti Haapala is professor (emeritus) of history and the first director of the CoE. His special areas of research are social history and methodology of history. In HEX (Lived Welfare State) his focus is in the study of social structures and life-chance, i.e. the “limits of experience”, and in the history of social sciences as national identity (Lived Nation).
Ville Kivimäki
Lived Nation Team Leader, Board Member
Ville Kivimäki has studied the social and cultural history of the Second World War and its aftermath in Finland, with a special emphasis on the traumatic war experiences and their psychiatric treatment. His main methodological interests are in the history of emotions, gender, and the German tradition of Erfahrungsgeschichte. In the CoE, Kivimäki leads the Lived Nation research team and studies the national experiences of violence and stress in the twentieth century.
Raisa Maria Toivo
Lived Religion Team Leader, Vice Director of HEX 2022-
Raisa Maria Toivo works on the history of early modern religion, gender and family, with a focus on structural, social and shared experience, and a smaller side current on magic and witchcraft. She is currently a Finnish Academy Research Fellow and heads the HEX group on ‘lived religion’.
Johanna Annola
Academy research fellow, Lived Welfare state co-leader, Board Member
Academy research fellow Johanna Annola investigates three Finnish women’s prisons in the long nineteenth century. Her project concentrates on prison as a lived institution, the changing notions of discipline, and other gendered aspects of prison life. The aim of the project is to deliver new knowledge about the production of prison and also about underprivileged individuals’ experience of modernisation in northern Europe. Previously, Annola has been working on poorhouses, Magdalene asylums, and grassroots level experiences of social mobility.
Daniel Blackie
Senior research fellow
Daniel Blackie specialises in the history of disability, c. 1700–1900. As a member of the ‘Lived Religion and the Changing Meaning(s) of Disability’ team working at HEX, his current research focuses on the significance of religious beliefs and practices to understandings and experiences of disability during the Industrial Revolution.
Rob Boddice
University Researcher
Rob Boddice (PhD, FRHistS) joined HEX in 2020. He has previously held positions at Harvard University, McGill University, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Freie Universität Berlin. Boddice has published extensively in the history of medicine, the history of science and the history of emotions. His recent books include The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution and Victorian Civilization (University of Illinois Press, 2016), The History of Emotions (Manchester University Press, 2018), A History of Feelings (Reaktion, 2019), Emotion, Sense, Experience, with Mark Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Feeling Dis-Ease in Modern History: Experiencing Medicine and Illness (Bloomsbury), edited with Bettina Hitzer, will be published in 2022. He is currently writing Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience (Polity, 2022) and completing a four-volume set on scientific knowledge production in the long nineteenth century called Experiment, Expertise, Experience (Routledge, 2023).
Reetta Eiranen
Postdoctoral Researcher
Reetta Eiranen focuses on the histories of experience, emotions, gender and nationalism. Her theoretical and methodological interests include e.g. hermeneutics, epistolary research and narrative approaches. In her PhD dissertation, defended in June 2019, she studied how the close relationships and nationalistic cause intertwined in emotional and gendered ways in a key family of Finnish nineteenth-century nationalism, the Tengströms.
Personal profile page | Twitter
Minna Harjula
University Researcher
University researcher Minna Harjula has specialized in the history of welfare policies. She focuses on lived welfare state as experienced encounters between citizens and local social security institutions in Finland in the 1930s-1980s. By analyzing the divergent experiences of individual-society relationship in these encounters, her study opens a perspective to the lived construction and legitimation of Finnish welfare state. Previously she has focused on disability history, health policy, health citizenship and on the linkage between political and social citizenship in Finland in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.
Kirsi-Maria Hytönen
Postdoctoral Researcher
Kirsi-Maria Hytönen is a postdoctoral researcher and an ethnologist. Her main interests are oral history, experiences of the Second World War and postwar society, and memories of childhood and child welfare. Her research teams in HEX are ‘lived welfare’ and ‘lived nation’, with a research focus on experiences of foster care in a Finnish welfare state.
Anna-Stina Hägglund
Postdoctoral Researcher
Anna-Stina Hägglund is a postdoctoral researcher in the project Lived Religion in Medieval Finland. Her areas of expertise are the social and cultural history of pious donations, Birgittine monasteries, and the history of the Baltic Sea Region. Within the frames of the project Lived Religion in Medieval Finland she studies dating practices of medieval charters and references to feast days of saints in the diocese of Turku. She also studies the Birgittine monastery Nådendal and the lived religious practices of its benefactors.
Mervi Kaarninen
Senior Lecturer
Mervi Kaarninen focuses on the living conditions of children and youth and relations between children and parents during the crises of the twentieth century. Mervi Kaarninen has published several books and articles on the Finnish childhood and youth, on gender history and on the social history of education.
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa
University Researcher, Lived Religion Team co-leader, Board Member
University researcher Sari Katajala-Peltomaa studies late medieval lived religion by analysing rituals, sermons and miracle narrations. Her work concentrates on how religion-as-lived turned norms and values into social actions and performances – and how rituals and narrations in turn shaped values and institutions. Currently she analyses “imagined experiences” and sensory elements in creating the sacred in sermons of Vadstena Abbey from 15th century.
Lived Religion in Medieval Finland -Project Page
Mikko Kemppainen
Postdoctoral Researcher/Coordinator, Board Secretary
In his studies, postdoctoral researcher Mikko Kemppainen focuses on the interaction between political ideas, religion and gender. In 2020, he defended his doctoral dissertation on Finnish female working class authors at the beginning of the 20th century. Kemppainen acts also as the HEX coordinator.
Heikki Kokko
Postdoctoral Researcher
Postdoctoral researcher Heikki Kokko has specialized in the history of modern society “from below”. In the research groups Lived welfare state and Lived nation Kokko studies the experience of the modern belonging to society in Finland in the mid-1800s. Especially, he focuses on the societal significance of the information technology in the construction of the Western modern individual-society relationship. His study opens a perspective to the modern notion of society as a new way of defining one’s belonging to a larger “translocal” entity, which is an extension of the local. Previously, he has focused on the emerging of the Western notion of the modern self in the thinking of ordinary people. His special areas of research are conceptual history and digital history.
Within HEX, Kokko coordinates the digital history project Translocalis Database, which builds a database of readers’ letters that were published in the name of local communities in the 19th century Finnish press.
Personal profile page | Translocalis Database| Twitter | Academia.edu
Jenni Kuuliala
University Researcher
Jenni Kuuliala’s work focuses on medieval and early modern social history of medicine. In HEX, she works in the teams ‘lived religion’ and also ‘lived welfare state’, where she focuses on the interconnection of lived religion and healing. She is particularly interested in the ways ‘lived religion’ and the experience of infirmity intertwined in the period.
Kuuliala publishes on the history of dis/ability, sainthood, childhood, and religious healing. Currently she is also leading a public disability history project funded by the Kone Foundation and the research project ‘Lived Religion and the Changing Meaning(s) of Disability from the Late Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution’ funded by the Academy of Finland.
Twitter | Academia.edu profile | vammaisuudenhistoria.fi | Lived Religion and the Changing Meaning(s) of Disability | Personal profile page
Sofia Lahti
Postdoctoral Researcher
Sofia Lahti is an art historian specialized in medieval reliquaries, religious images and artefacts in the Nordic countries. She works in the projects Lived Religion in Medieval Finland (Tampere University), Mapping Lived Religion: Medieval Cults of Saints in Sweden and Finland (Linnaeus University, Sweden) and Fragmentation and Iconoclash in Medieval and Early Modern Objects (Helsinki University). In these projects, she studies Nordic medieval artefacts as manifestations of lived religion and their varying processes of fragmentation, disappearance and survival since the Middle Ages.
Project websites:
https://projects.tuni.fi/elettyusko/
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/kuvakalske/
Academia profile: https://linnaeus.academia.edu/SofiaLahti
Tuomas Laine-Frigren
Postdoctoral Researcher
Tuomas Laine-Frigren is a postdoctoral researcher specialized in the history of childhood, mental health and psychology. In HEX, Laine-Frigren studies the readjustment of child evacuees returning to Finland after WWII. The research focuses on encounters between child experts and ‘war children’ but also sets out to interpret children’s own coping strategies and what might be called their lived experience. In his previous research, Laine-Frigren has studied psychological expertise and social planning in Cold War Hungary, rehabilitation of disabled veterans in Post-WWII Finland, and political construction of collective victim identities.
Hanna Lindberg
Postdoctoral Researcher
Hanna Lindberg is a postdoctoral researcher specialized in the history of the welfare state, social movements, and minorities. In HEX, she studies the positions and experiences of minorities in the expanding and declining Finnish welfare state during the second half of the 20th century, especially focusing on the case of the Finland-Swedish Deaf. She has previously published works on the construction of gender in academic social policy, and the history of scientific writing in Finland.
Antti Malinen
Postdoctoral Researcher
Antti Malinen is a postdoctoral researcher specialized in the history of childhood and family life. His main research focus is on how societies, institutions and especially families and children are coping and how they are influenced by political and social crises, including military conflicts. In HEX Malinen will investigate how children have experienced and articulated their feelings of distress in 20th century Finland, both in writing and through drawings, and also in their behaviour and bodily expressions.
Malinen has written extensively on the social history of post-WWI and WWII Finland, especially from the perspectives of experiences, emotions and gender. In his recent non-fiction book (2017, Gaudeamus) Malinen studied the experience of post-war Finnish childhood. Currently he is writing a book on the role of friendships in children’s lives and welfare.
Malinen also manages a webpage www.lapsuudenhistoriaa.fi (in Finnish) specialized on the history of childhood.
Lapsuuden historiaa (@antti__malinen) / Twitter
https://www.instagram.com/lapsuudenhistoriaa.fi/
Academia.edu profile | ResearchGate profile
Riikka Miettinen
Postdoctoral Researcher
Riikka Miettinen is a postdoctoral researcher specialized in the history of early modern Sweden and Finland. Working in two thematic groups of HEX, ‘lived religion’ and ‘lived welfare state’, she is studying the social history of insanity, disability and poor relief. Her project focuses on the interconnections between religion, welfare and the experiences of those considered mentally deviant in early modern (ca. 1550–1800) Sweden and Finland. In particular, she is interested in the early modern ‘welfare systems’ and the role of religion in the everyday lives of the insane.
She has previously published on the history of suicides and death, the rural landless and disability history. Her recent publications include a monograph based on her PhD thesis, Suicide, Law, and Community in Early Modern Sweden (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Heidi Morrison
Senior Research Fellow
Heidi Morrison is a specialist in modern Middle East history, the history of childhood, and oral history. She seeks to better understand the lived experience of children and youth in modern and contemporary global history, particularly as it relates to the nation. Her work on the history of experience employs the technique of portraiture, which blends artistic expression with systematic empirical research to capture the complex and subtle dynamics of human experience (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davies, 1994). Heidi is on leave from her position as associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse in the USA.
She is co-general editor of the forthcoming 6-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Youth and 4-volume Routledge History of Children and Childhood. She is currently working on an edited volume about lived resistance among Palestinian children and a monograph on narration, memory, and children’s trauma in Palestine. While at HEX, Heidi will begin a new joint project with the Tampere University medical school on the history of children’s global health. Heidi is the author of Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt (Palgrave 2015) and the editor of The Global History of Childhood Reader (Routledge 2012).
Stephanie Olsen
University Researcher
Stephanie Olsen (Ph.D, FRHistS) is an historian of childhood, youth, education, experiences and the emotions, with a particular focus on the British world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen (Bloomsbury, 2014), co-author of Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, c. 1870-1970 (Oxford University Press, 2014), and editor of Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (Palgrave, 2015). Her research focuses on the ‘Lived Nation’ in the context of the British Empire, specifically children’s education and the cultivation of hope in the First World War. She is the co-editor of The Cultural History of Youth (6 volumes, Bloomsbury, 2023) and Children, Childhood and Youth in the Long Nineteenth Century (4 volumes, Routledge, 2023), and edits the journal History of Education.
Curriculum Vitae | Twitter | Academia.edu profile | Website
Katariina Parhi
Postdoctoral researcher
Katariina Parhi is a historian of science and ideas who specializes in medical history and historical criminology. Her dissertation (2018) deals with the history of the diagnosis of psychopathy in Finland. She has also written a book on the topic titled Sopeutumattomat: Psykopatian historia Suomessa (Siltala, 2019). Since then, Parhi has worked on the history of epidemiology and is one of the editors of Historical Explorations of Modern Epidemiology: Patterns, Populations and Pathologies (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2022). She is also working on a monograph about drug-using young people and their treatment in the 1960s and 1970s. In HEX, Parhi works on a new project on Finnish correctional labor facilities (workhouses) from the 1920s until the 1980s, funded by the Academy of Finland.
Rose-Marie Peake
Postdoctoral Reseacher
Rose-Marie Peake (pronouns she/her/hers) specializes in early modern history, especially gender, body, and sexuality. She is currently working on an Academy of Finland funded project on queer lived religion in seventeenth-century France.
She earned her PhD in History at the University of Helsinki in 2016. Her monograph The Power of Religious Societies in Shaping Early Modern Society and Identities (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) is based on her PhD dissertation. Her other contributions include the volume Lived Religion and Everyday Life in Early Modern Hagiographic Material (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) edited together with Jenni Kuuliala and Päivi Räisänen-Schröder, and Korsetti ja krusifiksi – vaikutusvaltaisia barokin ajan pariisittaria (“Corset and crucifix – influential Parisian women in the age of the Baroque“, Gaudeamus, 2019) together with Riikka-Maria Rosenberg.
Aapo Roselius
Aapo Roselius has specialized in the history of the 1918 Civil War in Finland and the remembrance of the war. He has also published on rightwing mobilization during the 1930s and on the resettlement of Karelian refugees during and after the second world war. At HEX he works as researcher in the Academy of Finland research project “A Dim Light of Dawn: Finnish Post-Cold War Experiences Between East and West, 1989–1995”.
Sami Suodenjoki
University Researcher
Sami Suodenjoki is specialized in labour history, popular politics and rural modernization. His HEX project deals with the experiential bases of political mobilisations in Finland and the Russian empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Suodenjoki focuses on how ordinary people’s encounters with the imperial authority shaped popular experiences of the empire and how these lived experiences linked with class and national identities. He also studies the experiences of inclusion in and exclusion from local government by charting the establishment of municipal councils in the Finnish countryside.
Twitter | Personal profile page
Tuomas Tepora
University Researcher
Tuomas Tepora joined HEX in September 2021. He has previously held positions and fellowships at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and at Queen Mary College, University of London. He has studied and published on the history of emotions, commemoration, and the cultural history of war in connection with 20th-century conflicts. At HEX, he works as a PI of the Academy of Finland research project “A Dim Light of Dawn: Finnish Post-Cold War Experiences Between East and West, 1989–1995”.
Marko Tikka
University Researcher
PhD, (Title of Docent) Marko Tikka is university researcher in History in Tampere University. His research interests are in twentieth-century history, especially the history of the 1918 Civil War in Finland, transition-from-war-to-peace processes and the history of the Finnish popular music. In the Lived Nation Team he will focuse on ideas of the nation in early Finnish popular music and on the processes in restitution of the historical injustices in Finland.
Ville Yliaska
Ville Yliaska has studied and published on the history of administration (New Public Management) and privatization and Finnish economic crises in the 1970s and 1990s. In HEX he works in the Academy of Finland research project “A Dim Light of Dawn: Finnish Post-Cold War Experiences Between East and West, 1989–1995” where he will investigate how citizens have experienced and articulated their experiences in the economic crisis of the early 1990s.
Tanja Vahtikari
Senior Research Fellow, Lived Nation Team co-leader, Board Member
Tanja Vahtikari is a specialist in history of heritage and urban history. Her research interests also include history of emotions and experiences, everyday nationalism and history of children, on which she works at HEX. Tanja is a PI in a research project “Baby Box as an Emotional Object: The Socio-material Experiences of the Finnish Welfare State from the 1930s to the Present,” funded by the Kone Foundation (2020–2024).
She is the author of Valuing World Heritage Cities (Routledge, 2017), co-editor of Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000 (Palgrave, 2021) and co-editor of Humanistinen kaupunkitutkimus (Gaudeamus, 2021). She has co-authored a European Commission Policy Review Innovation in Cultural Heritage Research. For an integrated European Research Policy (2018). Tanja is on leave from her position as senior lecturer in historical methodology at Tampere University.
Affiliated members
Miia Kuha
Postdoctoral Researcher
Postdoctoral researcher Miia Kuha (pronouns she/her/hers) studies the roles, agency, and position of clergymen’s wives and widows in Lutheran parish communities in the eastern parts of the Swedish kingdom (1650–1710). She analyses how the lived experience of a clergyman’s wife – an exemplary female Christian, but also the mistress of the parsonage – was formed and constructed in the cultural and social exchange in rural parish communities. Kuha has previously published articles on lived religion among the peasantry as well as the development of modern cultural history in Finland and Sweden.
Karen McCluskey
Senior lecturer
Karen is an art historian with a particular research focus on art and lived religious experience in the later Middle Ages. She is currently interrogating the possibilities inherent in the intersection of art history and the history of experience. In her current HEX projects, she is exploring how the artistic record can illuminate the experience of the cult of St Christopher in Renaissance Venice and interrogating what an overpainting by a group of nuns on Paolo Veneziano’s Vita panel of Leone Bembo (c.1350) can reveal about the broader lived experience of the women who inhabited the convent of San Lorenzo in Venice.
Karen is the author of ‘New saints in Late-Mediaeval Venice, 1200-1500: a typological study’ (Routledge, 2020). Two recent chapters with a HEX focus include: ‘When the Fury of the Proud Sea Re-awoke’: Water, Devotion, and Lived Experience in Renaissance Venice’ in Lived Religion and Everyday Life in Palgrave’s Studies in the History of Experience (2019) and ‘Ability and Disability in the Pictorial Vitae of beata Fina in Fifteenth Century San Gimignano’, Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (forthcoming late 2021).
Andrew G. Newby
Kone Foundation Senior Research Fellow
Andrew Newby is a specialist in international history (particularly of the “Long Nineteenth Century”) and Docent in European Area and Cultural Studies. His particular focus in HEX is on the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s, particularly in comparative perspective (in terms of local and national governance, and commemoration / memorialisation). His current project at Tampere Institute for Advanced Social Research examines the international aid which was sent to Finland in the 1850s and 60s, the reasons for that aid, and how it was distributed.
Louise Settle
Postdoctoral Researcher
Louise Settle is postdoctoral researcher who specialises in the history of crime, gender and social work in Britain during the twentieth century. In HEX she is completing a book project on the history of probation in Britain (1907-1960) which explores the role of the British state in policing interpersonal relationships and emotions. The project focuses on how the everyday practices of probation policies influenced the experiences of probationers convicted for offences such as domestic violence, attempted suicide, prostitution, gross indecency and indecent assault.
Louise has previously published on the history of prostitution, the geography of crime, and child sexual abuse. A monograph based on her PhD thesis, Sex for Sale in Scotland: Prostitution in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1900-1939, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2016.