Trivium – Tampere Centre for Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies
Trivium, founded on 10 October 2006, is a multidisciplinary research centre within the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University. Its purpose is to increase dialogue and encourage the study of classical, medieval, and early modern cultures, society, and everyday life. The members of the centre work mainly with history, literature, and philosophy.
Trivium serves as a research network, promoting research on social and cultural change as well as longue durée continuities from antiquity to the early modern period. Its research aims at the crossing of borders through the approaches used, the methodologies applied, and the topics selected.
Over the last twenty years, Trivium’s research has concentrated on the following topics:
• Childhood, family, and life cycle
• Conflicts, crises, and catastrophes
• Cultural interaction and communication
• Gender and gendered practices
• Health, illness, dis/ability, and healing
• Historical poetics, narrativity, and literary genres
• Religion, society, and everyday life
By fostering collaboration among researchers with shared interests, Trivium acts as a catalyst for the adoption of new methods, theories, and perspectives. Trivium also provides a space for networking, brainstorming new projects, and, crucially, sharing experiences within the competitive university environment.
Trivium’s core activities revolve around seminars, book launches, and workshops. These gatherings provide a platform for sharing the diverse research conducted under the Trivium umbrella. Trivium also organises a conference series, Passages from Antiquity to Medieval and Early Modern Societies. The ninth conference will take place on 13–15 August 2025, with the theme being Violence, War, and Suffering.
International collaboration is integral to Trivium’s activities, spreading the networks among the members by supporting research visits abroad and inviting scholars to Tampere. Trivium communicates research findings via podcasts, blogging, social media, and specific events directed to the general public while collaborating closely with various museums, institutes, and associations, as well as with secondary schooling.
Trivium connects people with an enthusiasm for the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds. For younger scholars, Trivium offers support and mentoring to open up the world of learning and professional research, while for the more advanced, Trivium creates and maintains research networks and facilitates research by offering a platform for various activities.
If you are a scholar working in this kind of framework, have a connection to Tampere University, or are seeking an academic home for your research project, please get in touch.
Strategy of Trivium
Trivium’s vision: Paideia in paradeisos. Trivium supports research and learning of the past, while focusing on the future, creating an enthusiastic and flourishing environment for researchers at all career stages.
The mission: Research at Trivium is based on critical and broad approaches with a longue-durée perspective that reforms customary modes of thinking. Trivium’s research renews and challenges global academia from within and brings it into fruitful contact with society. Our long-term perspective directs the gaze towards the future, helping to find solutions to contemporary societal and cultural challenges – such as detachment, alterity/othering, and generational conflict – to contribute to cultural coexistence and recognition.
Trivium’s strategic goal is to support the study of widely meaningful topics from innovative perspectives and analyse major problems of research relevant for sustainable and self-renewing academia and society.
To reach this end, Trivium:
1) Contributes to the internationalisation of research by
o encouraging students and younger scholars to take part in the international academic community through academic meetings;
o encouraging researchers to invite distinguished scholars as visiting fellows, organise international expert workshops and conferences, and participate in ambitious research projects;
2) Creates a platform for guidance, mentoring, and sharing of experiences for people at all academic career stages who are enthusiastic about the preindustrial world;
3) Creates and supports excellent quality research projects, networks, and project funding applications, and makes them visible in the academic world and society at large;
4) Contributes to the public understanding of research for these areas of study