CHAIR
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir
Professor in Comparative Literature
CO-CHAIRS
Ulla Savolainen
Ulla Savolainen (PhD) is an Academy of Finland post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Arts, Department of Cultures. She is a specialist in cultural memory studies, oral history, and narrative research. Her ongoing research project ”Memory Unchained” (SA 1308661) focuses on (autobiographical) literature related to the experiences of Ingrian Finns (a historical minority of Russia) from the viewpoint of cultural memory. Her doctoral dissertation (2015) analyzed life writings of former Karelian child evacuees in Finland and reminiscing as a genre of vernacular expression. She has also researched oral histories of internments of German and Hungarian citizens in Finland in 1944–1946 and analyzed the issue of retrospective justice and compensation. She has published widely on oral history, memory, narrative, vernacular literature, material culture, migration, diaspora, and transnationality. Savolainen is the chair of the Finnish Oral History Network FOHN and a member of the Young Academy Finland YAF.
Robert Nilsson Mohammadi
I am a historian holding a position as an associate senior lecturer at Malmö University.
My general research interest has to do with the politics of representation, which I explore in relation to how actors and users of history have been – and can be – engaged in explorations of history and in history-writing. My research concerns oral history and public history, transnationalism, racism and its counter-movements, the social movements of the 1960s, urban justice and youth work.
Jessica Ortner
I studied comparative literature, German and Cultural Studies in Odense (DK), Zürich and Copenhagen. In 2012, I finished my doctoral thesis on representation of the Holocaust in the magnum opus of the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek Die Kinder der Toten (1995). The thesis is published under the title Poetologie “nach Auschwitz”. Narratologie, Semarntik und sekundäre Zeugenschaft in Elfriede Jelineks Roman ‚Die Kinder der Toten.‘ (Berlin: Frank&Timme, 2016).
In the running and recent research project, I have turned my attention to migrant literature. I investigate circulation of memories from Eastern Europe /Balkan to the West (i.e. Germany, Scandinavia, UK), clashes of memory cultures, the interaction and frictions between institutional and artistic memory cultures and the impact of artistic works on art on cultural memory.
Between 2019 and 2022 i will be primary investigator of the collaborative project on post-Yugoslav migrant literature in Germany, Scandinavia and England
Astrid Rasch
I'm an Associate Professor of Anglophone Cultural Studies at the Department of Language and Literature. My research examines memory culture at the end of the British Empire with a particular focus on memoirs from Zimbabwe, Australia and the Caribbean, and post-imperial memory politics in contemporary Britain. I hold a master and a PhD in English from the University of Copenhagen. In addition, I have studied at Monash University, Melbourne and been a visiting doctoral fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
ADVISORY BOARD
Dagmar Brunow, Linnaeus University
Anne Heimo, University of Turku
Hans Lauge Hansen, Århus University
Heiko Pääbo, University of Tartu
Tea Sindbæk Andersen, University of Copenhagen
John Sundholm, Stockholm University
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund University