Areas of expertise
Biography
I work as a project coordinator at the Department of Computing. Currently, a major part of my work is coordination of AI Academy, a center of University of Turku for artificial intelligence research and education.
I’m also a PhD candidate of cultural history. I study the cultural history of nonreligion under title "Your God is no longer mine" - Lived Nonreligion of Four Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States.
Teaching
Memory and Narrative seminar
Master's-level seminar for students of cultural history who are in the process of writing their thesis. I taught the seminar together with Liisa Lalu and Karoliina Sjö.
2016-2017
Battling over 'America': A Historical Look at the Culture Wars in the United States.
The course examined the basics of the "culture war" thesis, its main arguments and its most prominent criticisms, and then explore the historical dimensions of the tensions over “America” and “Americanness” that lie at the core of the “culture wars.” I taught the course together with Pekka Kolehmainen.
Research
My PhD project focuses on the cultural history of nonreligion: I study the lived unbelief of women in the context of the 19th century United States. Female unbelief in the 19th century is especially important to explore since unbelief was particularly problematic for women, as a significant part of “true womanhood,” the cultural construction of an ideal woman, was piety. I ask what kinds of spaces of agency the identity of an unbeliever opened and closed for women who questioned the very nature of woman as the more religious sex. How did women manage to combine womanhood and unbelief in their everyday life in this challenging context, how did they live unbelief? My research builds upon the texts written by women as well as the various freethinker periodicals, including the most long-lived publications The Boston Investigator and The Truth Seeker.