The project leader, Tintti Klapuri, is University Lecturer in Russian literature at the University of Helsinki. Her areas of research include Russian modernism (Anton Chekhov), time and space in Russian literature, transnational contemporary Russian literature, and Finnish and Finland-Swedish translation history of Russian literature.
In the project Northern Neighbours, Klapuri examines Kola Sámi literature written in the 1980s–2000s. The research focuses on the interconnections of nature and temporality in Askold Bazhanov’s and Oktiabrina Voronova’s writings.
E-mail: tintti.klapuri@helsinki.fi
Tintti Klapuri's researcher profile
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Eeva Kuikka is a specialist in animal studies, posthumanist theory and indigenous literature of the Russian Arctic. Her ongoing doctoral research examines human-animal relationships in literature of the Russian North and the Arctic. The research material consists of texts by both Russian writers and writers of the indigenous northern peoples. In her subproject of the project Northern Neighbours, “Modernizing the human-animal relations of the North”, which is part of her PhD research, Kuikka examines how modernization and industrialization of the North of Russia is portrayed in literary texts in relation to the fauna of the area.
E-mail: eeva.kuikka@tuni.fi
Eeva Kuikka's researcher profile
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Anni Lappela is a researcher specialized in contemporary Russian fiction. In her subproject of the project Northern Neighbours, “Salekhard in Contemporary Russian Comics and Prose”, Lappela explores depictions and meanings of nature and urban space in 21st-century Russian comics and fiction. Lappela's research is part of her doctoral dissertation, which examines representations of provincial cities in contemporary Russian literature.
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Karina Lukin is a folklorist specialized in oral and literary culture of the Nenets. She has examined the relationship of narration and mythology with landscape, places, and the past. Additionally, she is interested in the reciprocity of oral and written, and social and communal hierarchies related to it. In her subproject of the Northern Neighbours project, “Human and Animal Relationships of the Nenets in the 1950s–1970s”, Lukin examines the relationships between the human and the non-human, as well as between ethnic minorities and Russians in Nenets literatures written in Russian.
E-mail: karina.lukin@helsinki.fi
Karina Lukin's researcher profile
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Mika Perkiömäki is specialized in ecocritical literary studies and Soviet village prose. His doctoral thesis on the meanings of the river in Russian natural-philosophical literature of the 1970s–1990s was published in 2021. In his subproject of the Northern Neighbours project, “The North of Pomor Literature”, Perkiömäki examines the relationships between nature and the human in the Pomor literature of the 1920s–1960s, especially in the works of the folklorist-writer Boris Shergin and the writer of northern fairy tales, Stepan Pisakhov.
E-mail: mika.perkiomaki@helsinki.fi
Mika Perkiömäki's researcher profile
Image: Mika Perkiömäki