Now that I think of it, the first winter of my HCAS period 2003-2006 was a turning point in my academic career. I didn’t see that then though. I just wanted to delve into a pile of books and immerse myself in different fields of study, from the most recent theories of narrative and fiction to studies on travel writing and postcolonial studies, let alone novels, short fiction, and travel books set in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The interdisciplinary, collegial environment at HCAS was truly inspirational. I appreciated the challenge of making my research comprehensible and relevant to colleagues who were not in literary studies. It was good to discover that the concept of narrative brought many of us together from social studies, anthropology, exegetics, and the study of self-writing. We organized small conferences and co-edited journal issues (ColleEgium, Partial Answers). We wrote a Christmas play where I had my chance to play an extraterrestrial.
I enjoyed the privilege of some headspace. I did not have a clear idea of a monograph when I came to HCAS, but went along doing presentations, articles, and editorial work. I supervised the Finnish translation of Dorrit Cohn’s Distinction of Fiction (2006). But the monograph came out eventually. Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction (The Ohio State UP, 2015) demonstrates how early twentieth-century European travel writing, journal keeping, and fiction converged in ways that inform current debates about the fiction/nonfiction distinction.
My HCAS project still carries on in my research work today. In my present role as Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki I look back on my time at HCAS with a mixture of gratitude and fond memories.
I earned my PhD in Classical and Byzantine Philology from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2011. I taught Ancient Greek, Latin, and Late Antiquity philosophy at St. Tikhon University in Moscow. In 2015, I received Marie Skłodowska-Curie funding at Aarhus University, which led to my monograph, "Knowledge, Language, and Intellection from Origen to Gregory Nazianzen" (Peter Lang, 2017).
In 2018, I was awarded a Core Fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where I researched Nemesius of Emesa's "De Natura Hominis". The following year, I founded the academic series "Contexts of Ancient and Medieval Anthropology" (Brill).
From 2020 to 2023, I served as a senior researcher and Vice-Leader of the project “Authorial Publication in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages” at the University of Helsinki.
I currently work as a postdoctoral researcher in the EX-PATRIA project at the University of Lille, HALMA Center. I have recently secured an SNSF Consolidator Grant for my upcoming project, “Ageing and Old Age in the 4th to 6th Cent. Roman Empire: Religious, Legal, Social and Physical Dimensions (RomAge),” which is set to begin in 2025 at the University of Bern.
I began developing the project idea during my time at the Helsinki Collegium, greatly benefiting from discussions with colleagues and the ERC training provided by the University of Helsinki's research support office. No other academic environment has been as valuable to me as my time at the University of Helsinki.