Meet the people in the programme

The ENS Programme Director Hanna Tuominen is a Jean Monnet professor focusing on European Union values and contestation. She is a docent in European studies at the University of Helsinki and in International Politics at the University of Turku. She holds a PhD in Global Politics from the University of Helsinki. She currently holds research affiliations at the .

Hanna Tuominen is teaching and coordinating courses in joint studies (Current research, Common Challenges, Research methods), and in the EU-module (Europe and Asylum, EU values and Agents of Change, EU as a global actor). Part of these courses are related to her Jean Monnet project. She is responsible for the master’s seminar as well as supervising and tutoring students. She is also organizing social events for ENS students.

Her main research interests are related to EU values and norms, especially reflected in the external relations of the EU. She has studied the EU role in different human rights issues, mainly focusing on the UN and published articles on these topics. She is interested in norm contestation processes and norm advocacy of various actors. One of the cases concern contestations of the rule of law inside the EU. Tuominen has studied Europeanization processes, foreign policy differentiation and Nordic/Baltic cooperation concerning human rights and common asylum policy. 

The focus of the ENS programme is natural to her as she is interested in Nordic perspectives to European/EU cooperation and policymaking. Some of her latest research themes concern current Nordic and Finnish EU and UN policy, which reflect both continuity and change. 

ENS Deputy Programme Director Peter Stadius is a Research Director and Professor, at the . He is Docent at the . He is currently working as Professor for the , and teaching in the ENS Master's Programme. He is a specialist of  and a Supervisor for doctoral programme, in the , as well as the . 

Peter Stadius has been teaching at ENS over a decade, together with Professor Johan Strang he is in charge of the , which is one of two research institution partners of ENS. His background is in the discipline of history, but he has been teaching inter-disciplinary Nordic Studies since 1998.

His major research interests have been the image of the Nordic region seen form the outside, and especially the dynamics of north and south in Europe. Nordic cooperation history and current themes is also one of his long-lasting research and teaching subjects.

Johanna Kantola joined the  in the University Helsinki as Professor of European Societies and their Politics in November 2022. Her main teaching affiliation at the University of Helsinki is with the ENS Masters Programme. She was previously Professor of Gender Studies at Tampere University (2017–2022). She has a PhD in Politics from the University of Bristol (2004) and became Docent in Politics at the University of Helsinki in 2007. She is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Gender and EU Studies in the University of Tübingen, Germany (2022–2024).

Kantola was the Director of the research project  funded by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant (2018–2023) which studied European Parliament's political groups. She is also PI at the University of Helsinki for : Co-Creating Inclusive Intersectional Democratic Spaces Across Europe, EU Horizon Europe (2022–2026). Finally, she was the Director of the Academy of Finland (2016–2020) and University of Helsinki Research Funds (2015–2017) funded research project Gender and Power in Reconfigured Corporatist Finland 

Kantola teaches in courses on different aspects of European Union politics in ENS MA programme. Examples of her courses include Politics of the European Union; European Parliament and Party Politics; and Policies and Policy-making in the EU. She is also in charge of one of the MA thesis seminars.

You can find out more from .

Dr. Leena Malkki is a Docent from the . She is the Director from the . She takes part in the , and is a Supervisor for the , and  and .  

Dr. Leena Malkki is a historian and political scientist specialised in terrorism and political violence. Her areas of interest include terrorism in western countries, disengagement from terrorist campaigns, resilience to political violence, lone actor terrorism and leaderless resistance, school shootings, the development of Finnish counter-terrorism policy and counterradicalisation programmes in the European countries.

Her teaching at the ENS Programme focuses on terrorism, political violence and the development of policies to prevent and counter violent extremism and radicalisation. 

You can find out more about Leena Malkki on her 

Johan Strang is a professor at the . Trained as a philosopher, he has matured into a scholar of Nordic contemporary history and political thought. His research interests include Nordic cooperation, Nordic democracy, the rise and fall of the welfare state, and the intellectual and philosophical history of the 20th century. Currently, he is especially interested in the tensions between the social democratic welfare state and constitutional language (including human rights). 

In his Academy of Finland Research Fellowship project Norden since the End of History (NORDEND, 2019–2024) Strang examined the transformations of the Nordic region as a community and a political concept after the end of the Cold War. Currently, he is engaged in the programme Neoliberalism in the Nordics led by Professor Jenny Andersson at Uppsala University (Riksbankens Jublieumsfond. 2020–2025) and leads the Academy of Finland project Neoliberalisation of Nordic democracy (2022–2026). He is also affiliated with the Nordic Humanities Center (University of Copenhagen and University of Southern Denmark) and has spent longer research periods at the universities in Copenhagen (2024), Oslo (2017–2018), Bergen (2008–2010) and Södertörn (2015). 

At ENS, Strang teaches courses on Nordic politics and contemporary history. He is also responsible for a course unit on Nordic society, history and culture in Swedish to which anyone with rudimentary knowledge in any Scandinavian language is welcome. Strang supervises MA-theses at ENS and PhD-theses at the Doctoral Programme in Political, Societal and Regional Change (PYAM).