Research at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies
Our multidisciplinary School is an active participant in international discussion and debate, and we study the questions related to Finnishness and local Finnish communities from various different perspectives.
Our key research areas include the beginning of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, multiculturality and the processes used in cultural interaction, the arts and popular culture, studies on experiences, stories and memory, as well as humanities-oriented research on digitalisation. The School also places a strong emphasis on gender studies-oriented research across its subjects, and the School is an international pioneer in posthumanist research.
Research projects
Ongoing research projects
- 50 Years of Elomatic Oy
- Animal Agancy in Human Society: Finnish Perspectives 1890–2040
- A review of the archaeological materials from the Casagrande Block, Turku, and the area's research history, with a special emphasis on the Julin Plot excavations
- Another Route to University
- Artsequal: The Arts as Public Service
- Audiovisual Culture and the Cyclical Structures of Time from the 1920s to the end of the 1990s
- BSR Integrated Maritime Cultural Heritage
- Carvers of Change: The Use of Wood in Northeastern Europe between 1100 and 1600
- Centre of Excellence in Game Cultures
- Citizen Mindscapes: Detecting Social, Emotional and National Dynamics in Social Media
- Comics and Migration: Belonging, Narration, Activism
- Communal Preservation and Artistic Development of the Cultural Environment of Rural Kokemäenjokulaakso Municipal Structure
- Comprehending the Core by Peeling the Concepts: Analysing Famines in their Historical Contexts
- Computational History and the Transformation of Public Dicourse in Finland 1640–1910
- Dynamic Ontologies of Moral Agency from Kant to Nietzsche
- Folk Church and Marketization in Finland: An Empirical Investigation of the Technologization of Discourse and its Effects on Church Organization and Practice in a Changing Socio-Economic Environment
- Health and Cultural Heritage
- How to Read? Forms of Reading in Teaching Literature in the Upper Secondary School
- Indigenous Peoples at the Confluence of Worlds: Voluntary Isolation and Processes of Contact in the Peruvian Amazon
- Instrumental Narratives: Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory
- Interdisciplinary Colloboration Project: Relics of Turku Cathedral
- Kuntarakenne
- Landscapes and Interspecies Care: The Line between Man and Animal in Animal Care
- Literary Multilingualism in Modern Finland
- Localizing Feminist New Materialisms
- Ludification and the Emergence of Playful Culture
- Making and Interpreting Finnish National Past: The Role of Finnish Archives as Networks of Power and Sites of Memory
- Messy Worlds, Language Materials and Nature Cultures in Art Research
- Sexuality and Play in Media Culture
- Using Nature-oriented Solutions in Built Environments as a Tool for Coping with Climate Change
- The Diary of Martin Crusius: A Previously Unknown Depiction of Life in Turku in the 1500s
- The Politics of Megaevents: A Study of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy between the 1960s and 1980s
- Noises and Voices: Languages, Media, Arts in Nordic Literatures
- See, Hear, Feel and Experience
- Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840–1914
- Profiling Premodern Authors
- Revisiting Finnish and Namibian Relations since 1860s
- Ristimäki in Ravattula: Finland's Oldest Church SiteTalking Machines: The Electronic Human Voice as an Interpreter of Emotions and Self-understanding between 1960 and 2020
- The Planning Project for the Study of the Industrial Cultural Heritage of the Coastal Region in Satakuntra
- Seekers of the New: Esotericism and Religious Transformation in Finland during the Era of Modernisation from the 1880s to the 1930s
- The Long Shadows of Hatred
- Viral Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe
Centres and Networks
Our research activities are characterised by the multidisciplinary research networks and centres that are coordinated by the School. These include:
The multidisciplinary Center for the Study of Christian Cultures brings together research and researchers focusing on the study of Christianity and Christian cultures from different perspectives such as those of humanities and social sciences. The research center examines the ideological, political, cultural and artistic, economic and everyday dimensions of Christianity, both in history and in the present. The foundation of the centre’s activities is its monthly seminar series. In addition, the center organizes various scientific seminars, gives teaching and produces publications on Christian cultures. In addition to research, the center's researchers participate in fulfilling the so-called third task of universities – societal participation – inter alia by acting as media commentators, maintaining a blog and organising public events.
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The multidisciplinary research centre SELMA is focused on the connections between storytelling, experientiality, and cultural memory from various theoretical and historical perspectives. The centre produces research on, for example, life-writing, trauma narratives, and digital storytelling. It approaches the relationship between experience, story, and memory utilising different research traditions and at the same time, produces interdisciplinary dialogue. The centre’s operation involves several faculties, and as a nationally leading centre for research in cultural memory, it compiles research related to the University’s thematic collaboration in cultural memory and societal change. SELMA collaborates internationally with various networks that conduct research on storytelling and memory. In addition, it organises research events on both theoretical and societally topical issues. The centre aims to promote dialogue between the arts and sciences and to function as a community that brings together researchers, artists, and people outside academia.
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The Human–Animal Studies Network in Turku brings together research on animals and human–animal relations. The Network operates at the University of Turku, in the Faculty of Humanities, but it also involves researchers from the wider Turku area. The studies focus on, for instance, encounters and boundaries between humans and other animals, their shared history and interaction, as well as animal representations and agency. The Network regularly organises research seminars and various other events such as guest lectures.
> More information: Nora Schuurman
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