Saku
Pihko
Contact
Areas of expertise
Biography
I am a postdoctoral researcher in Cultural History working on the research project Cultures of Control? Lived Religion and Lay Challenges to Normativity in Later Medieval Europe, which is funded by the Research Council of Finland. I received my PhD from Tampere University in December 2023. My doctoral dissertation, Information and Lived Religion in Inquisition Records from Medieval Languedoc, explored information behaviour and lived religion in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century inquisition records from Languedoc. After completing my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Council of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at Tampere University. Previously, I have also worked as a researcher at the Finnish Institute in Rome.
Teaching
I have taught introductory and intermediate-level courses in history and Latin at Tampere University in both lecture and seminar formats. My most recent course was Medieval Inquisitions and Heresies, which I taught in spring 2025. I have also served as a visiting teacher at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 2024. I am currently doing studies in university pedagogy.
Research
My research interests include the history of medieval inquisitions and heresies, the history of lived religion and experience, and the methodological and theoretical dimensions of historical research, particularly the epistemological possibilities and limitations of knowledge about the past. More recently, I have also expanded my research to include medieval cults of saints and canonisation processes.
My research is characterised by methodological transparency and interdisciplinarity. I have previously applied concepts and approaches from fields such as information science and psychology to historical research, and I am increasingly interested in the possibilities of applying insights from disciplines concerned with the human mind, such as the cognitive science of religion, to historical research.