Johanna Niemi is the Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki.
As Collegium fellow 2002-2004 I had the opportunity to complete my monograph Criminal Procedure and Violence within a Partnership, which brought together my two research themes, gender law and procedural law. Even though the book was in Finnish, the Collegium period included internationalization, exemplified by the publication of Eva-Maria Svensson, Anu Pylkkänen & J. Niemi-Kiesiläinen (eds), Nordic Equality at a Crosscroads. Nordic Feminist Legal Studies Coping with Difference (2004), part of a trilogy on Nordic legal feminism.
Right after the Collegium period, I was recruited as a professor of law at the Umeå university. I really loved my period there, but as it was far away from family and friends, after three years I returned to Finland. Since then, I have worked as vice dean of education at UH and as professor of procedural law at University of Turku before returning to Helsinki, my alma mater.
Besides an opportunity for full-time research and internationalization, I want to thank the Collegium for a unique experience that changed the way I see the academic community. After years in the male dominated environment of the law faculty, I had a strong group of senior and mid-career women around me, such as, Liisa Husu, Tuula Gordon, Anneli Aemeleus, Päivi Pahta, Anu Korhonen, Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen and Anneli Meurman-Solin. Their professionalism, courage, and collegiality convinced me that women can find their way in the academic life. It is not supposed to be easy, but women have a lot to give. I am on that way.
Professor of United States history at the University of Edinburgh, I was an HCAS core fellow during the 2021-22 academic year. My time in Helsinki was crucially important to me in permitting work on a project that marked a turn in my research career. Having completed work in the past on the history of US electoral politics and political parties – especially focusing on the Republican Party – I turned my attention to politics and gender, with a project on the history of the ‘gender gap’ in voting. Not only did the fellowship offer me time, it also provided membership of an academic community that was supportive and that was committed to interdisciplinary exchange. Even if the pandemic was then creating some disruption for university activity, the fellowship furthermore created opportunity for me to forge connections with Helsinki academics, especially in North American Studies and Political Science. So significant are these to my academic development that I subsequently sought a UH docentship in North American Studies, to consolidate this interaction with Helsinki scholars.
So deeply was I able to explore my topic at the Collegium that my fellowship set in motion a certain reconceptualisation of another book manuscript (on a Republican Party politician) that I thought I was soon to finalise after returning from Helsinki. My HCAS fellowship, then, not only enriched immensely the ‘gender gap’ project but also a previous one – and, I am sure, future ones. The closing stages of my fellowship coincided with the celebration of the Collegium’s twentieth anniversary, which made it clear that HCAS has similarly transformed, for the long term, the research of so many scholars.