Alumni of the Month: Anat Pick and Mikko Tolonen

I am Professor of Film and the Head of the Department of Film at Queen Mary University of London. My work centres on the relationship between humanness and animality across image and text challenging human exceptionalism by exploring the shared “creatureliness” and vulnerability of human and nonhuman animals. My writings on film, literature and art draw deeply on the thought of the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, whose concepts of necessity, affliction, and attention inform my more-than-human, postsecular approach to art. My publications include , , and . I have written extensively on animals and the moving image (“Vegan Cinema”, 2018), the philosophy of Simone Weil (“Cinema as Metaxu”, 2020; “Simone Weil and Judaism”, 2026), and ecocinema (“More-than-Human Visualities in Recent Palestinian Film and Video”, 2026). 

My HCAS Core Fellowship in 2021–2022 was also my first time in Finland. In my mind, the Collegium and the city are inextricably linked, and both struck me as unlike any place I had been to before. Having lived and worked in landlocked London, the sea in Helsinki, in any direction, was never more than moments away. At the end of my fellowship, I knew I would return to the city. 

The Collegium offered both the solitude needed for reading and writing and a community of inspirational colleagues – scholars and artists – some of whom are now friends. During my one-year tenure at HCAS, I began to sketch out two projects: Permacinema: Rootedness, Regeneration, Resistance (forthcoming from Palgrave in 2026), and a book (nearly finished) on film and Simone Weil’s religious philosophy. Neither would have been possible without the Collegium’s intellectual generosity and the beauty of the Helsinki archipelago. My one regret is how quickly the time flew by. 

I am Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki and PI of the. We link large scale bibliographic data to full text and image corpora to trace how ideas move through print, with a core focus on the Enlightenment and its long reception. Current projects span hundreds of thousands of multilingual books, analyzing discourses, knowledge production, book history, and reception at scale. I also co-edit David Hume’s History of England for Oxford University Press.

My fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2012–2015), after finishing a monograph, Mandeville and Hume: Anatomists of Civil Society (2013), enabled a shift in my methodology from close reading to computational history. I began treating books simultaneously as cultural artefacts, data, and vehicles of meaning – an approach that later formed the basis for COMHIS. We started working with large language models (or AI, if you will) well before the recent boom, launched the Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon, and built international collaborations that matured into sustained lines on bibliographic data science, text reuse, semantic change, and reception studies. The Collegium’s rigorous seminars, combined with the protected writing time and dialogues with colleagues across disciplines not only reshaped how I frame questions and test claims, but also affected my way of building projects. I benefited enormously from the freedom and responsibility entrusted to me at HCAS.

Since HCAS, I have scaled that model – integrated, rigorous, open. Our results appear both in digital humanities venues and leading historical journals, as a deliberate test of computational relevance for history. I have helped build research infrastructure, served in disciplinary leadership and co-led training networks. Recognition, such as the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Open Science and Research Award in 2016 and the 2025 Annual Voltaire Foundation’s Digital Enlightenment lecture, reflects the work of our students, postdocs and partners. I continue to welcome early-career scholars to COMHIS who want to do historically serious, computationally robust research.