Kirsi Tuohela profile picture
Kirsi
Tuohela
Docent, School of History, Culture and Arts Studies
PhD, Docent

Contact

+358 29 450 3486
+358 50 329 0514
Caloniankuja 3
20500
Turku

Areas of expertise

cultural history
history of the 19th century Scandinavia
women's history
history of childhood and family
history of writing
autobiographies
history of madness and melancholy

Teaching


  • Within the Culture and Health research, in SOTE-Academy, I teach on experiences of being ill, past and present  
  • Gender, Writing and Textuality - research group together with Maarit Leskelä-Kärki
  • I supervise doctoral thesis in topics related to my field of interest, cultural history of illness and disability, cultural history of writing  

Research

My research interest are in the history of modernity and especially in the nineteenth century themes in Nordic countries. I have keen interest ih the history of the self and have studied various kinds of autobiographical texts from letters and diaries to published autobiographies. I have written about cultural history of women’s writing, cultural history of psychiatry, history of melancholia. My monograph (PhD thesis) analyzed women’s autobiographical texts on melancholia in the late nineteenth century Scandinavia. Recently I have been involved in two research projects, one of them focuses on written madness – mental illness in Finnish autobiographies and novels. The other focuses on the ‘inner child’ in Finnish autobiographical literature.


From August 2020 to August 2022 I work as researcher in Cultural History at the University of Turku. My project  "Broken Minds: Mentally Ill Individual and the History of Finnish Care" is funded by the Kone Foundation 

Publications

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