This symposium is organized by the Academy of Finland-funded projects Historical Travel and Communications in Finland, c. 1650 - 1917 and Survivors of Ragnarök. Tracing Late Iron Age and Medieval Maritime Migrations in the Baltic Sea Region at the University of Helsinki.
Kristin Ilves is a tenure-track Professor in Maritime Archaeology at the University of Helsinki. She received her PhD in archaeology from Uppsala University in 2012; she has been working at the University of Helsinki since 2018. Her research combines theoretical insights with a robust empirical approach to address problems that have lost something of their complexity to un-reflected traditional scientific understanding. Interested in maritime cultural landscapes, she is currently focusing on relating climate, environment, and culture change to each other and is particularly drawn to the construction of island identities. For more information, see https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/kristin-ilves
Anu Lahtinen is Professor of Finnish and Nordic History at the University of Helsinki. Her fields of expertise include Finnish and Nordic history, especially long-term social history and gender history. She has studied extensively women's agency in late medieval and early modern Finland and has led several research projects on family and gender history and the history of elites and nobility. She currently leads projects experimenting with computer-assisted handwritten text recognition (HTR) and historical GIS. For more information, see https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/anu-lahtinen.
Eljas Oksanen holds the title of Adjunct Professor (dosentti) in Archaeology at the University of Helsinki and is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Reading, UK. He was awarded a PhD in History by the University of Cambridge in 2007 for his dissertation on international exchanges in north-western Europe during the Middle Ages. Oksanen’s recent projects have combined intersectoral and data-driven Digital Humanities research of historical and archaeological materials, including deploying computational analyses to the study of past landscapes and the development of large-scale travel infrastructure. For more information, see https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/eljas-oksanen.