Peter Stadius is professor in Nordic Studies and director of CENS. He holds a PhD in History, and his research interests include image studies of the Nordic Region, the history of Nordic cooperation, Nordic colonialism and the Arctic. He has taken specific interest in the theme of North and South within Europe, studying how the content of this imagological dichotomy has developed over time. He has also pursued research on regionalisms, minorities and identity politics in the Nordic Region. Currently his research focus is on comparing Norden as a region and its cooperation practices with other macro-regional entities in Europe.
Stadius has led various project related to these research themes. He was the leader of the Nordforsk funded Nordic University Hub ReNEW (Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World) 2018-2024.
Johan Strang is Professor in Nordic Studies. Trained as a philosopher he has a broad interest in in Scandinavian political history (20th and 21st centuries). His publications include studies of Nordic cooperation, Nordic democracy and legal culture, the welfare state and human rights. He has also contributed to the discussion on transnational intellectual history with a small state perspective. His current projects include
Hasan is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Nordic Studies at Helsinki University. His PhD research focuses on the external policies of Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the Åland Islands. He studies how these Nordic sub-state polities push the boundaries of state sovereignty at different levels of international policy (Nordic cooperation, the European Union, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United Nations etc.). His research interests include Nordic foreign policy, Nordic paradiplomacy, Canadian foreign policy, global governance, security policy and Arctic governance. Akintug’s research is funded primarily by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, with additional grants from the Åland Cultural Funds, the Åland Parliament's Jubilee Fund, ReNEW travel grants, the Cultural Fund for Denmark and Finland among others. During his PhD studies he has been a visiting researcher at the University of Greenland, the Åland Islands Peace Institute, and Södertörn University in Sweden. He was a part of the Europaeum Scholar's Programme in the 2022-2023 cohort.
Olli Castrén is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Nordic Studies. His doctoral project studies the relationship between economic policy and security discourse in Finnish parliamentary debates from the 1990s to the early 2020s. His research interests include contemporary political history, economic policy, neoliberalism, and securitisation theory. He holds a master’s degree in European and Nordic Studies from the University of Helsinki and a bachelor’s degree in Government from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Malte Gasche is a project manager, lecturer and post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki. He defended his PhD, entitled Der „Germanische Wissenschaftseinsatz“ des „Ahnenerbes“ der SS, 1942-1945: Zwischen Vollendung der „völkischen Gemeinschaft“ und dem Streben nach „Erlösung“, at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2012. In addition to his research on doctrine topics in the field of History of Science, he is interested in majorities’ policy on minority groups and their strategies to gain societal security within mainstream society. Since 2012 Gasche has been representing Finland in the committee Genocid on the Roma within the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. From 2017 to 2018 he is managing the pilot-project Diverging Fates: Travelling Circus People in Europe under National Socialism.
Ilkka Kärrylä is University Teacher of Contemporary History at the University of Turku and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Nordic Studies. He is a political historian with research interests in intellectual and conceptual history, political ideologies, the history of economic thought and policy as well as the history of working life and labour market relations. Ilkka’s dissertation
Sami Koskelainen is a doctoral researcher in History. His PhD research focuses on football and Europeanisation in Finland since the 1980s. He also works two projects at CENS: one on physical activity services and elderly people with a minority background (
Mikael Björk-Winberg is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki and a teacher in history and social studies at the comprehensive and general upper secondary school Lauttasaaren yhteiskoulu. His PhD research focuses on Scandinavianism and examines how Finns were involved in Scandinavian transnational networks. The study asks, did Scandinavianism affect Finland politically or culturally and in what extent were Finns involved in Pan-Scandinavianism? In earlier works the focus has been on the core of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, but Björk-Winberg argues that the periphery of the Grand Duchy of Finland also played a part in the sphere of Scandinavianism.
Björk-Winberg's research has been funded by grants from the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and Niilo Helander's Foundation and by travel grants from Hanasaari's Finnish-Swedish, Finnish-Norwegian and Finnish-Danish Cultural Foundations. Articles on the subject have been published in the Journal of Finnish Studies (2021) and Historiallinen Aikakauskirja (2025).
Jana Lainto is a PhD student at the Centre for Nordic Studies (2016- ). She studies the institutionalization of Czechoslovakian cultural relations with the Nordic countries during the interwar period. Her main research interests are Czech cultural history, cultural transfer and image studies of the Nordic region in the Czech lands/later Czechoslovakia. She holds Master’s degrees from the University of Helsinki in European Studies and from the Palacký University Olomouc in History and Philosophy.
Maja Hagerman is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Nordic Studies. In her project she studies racial biology and photography, focusing on the development of the “Nordic type” as a visual icon conceptualized in photographs of people in the Nordic countries in the years 1910 to 1935.
She holds a master’s degree in History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. She is also an author and has written several award winning nonfiction books on and produced numerous historical documentary films. In 2012 she was promoted honorary doctor at Uppsala University, Faculty of humanities.
Maja Hagerman is a senior lecturer in arts at Dalarna Audiovisual Academy, Dalarna university, where she teaches historical documentary production. Her research interests therefore also includes the use of audiovisual media – filming and editing- as a research method to provide more depth to historical material, studying how audiovisuality can function as a complementary way to approach historical sources.
Tuire Liimatainen is a post-doctoral researcher at Migration Institute of Finland and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Nordic Studies. She defended her doctoral thesis in area and cultural studies, with specialization in Nordic Studies, Finnishnesses in Sweden: The Discursive Construction of Ethnicity in the Landscape of Social Media at the University of Helsinki in 2022. Her main research interests are migration, minorities, sociolinguistics, ethnopolitical activism, new media and social media in the Nordic context. She is affiliated with the project
Stefan Nygård is a historian with special interests in the modern history of intellectuals, culture and philosophy, in Finland, Scandinavia and Europe. He has worked and taught on these topics at the University of Helsinki and the European University Institute in Florence. He is currently involved in research projects on Asymmetries in European Intellectual Space (Academy of Finland), The Debt: Historicizing Europe's relations with the 'South' (HERA), Minority, Nation and the World (Academy of Finland), and a project on the philosopher and public intellectual Georg Henrik von Wright (Society of Swedish Literature in Finland).
Henrik Stenius is emeritus research director and founder of CENS. He specializes in the history of concepts. In recent years he has worked specifically on the concept of citizenship in the Nordic countries and the processes of translation as enablers of conceptual change. His publications include Nordic Associations in a European Perspective: European Civil Society (2010, edited together with Risto Alapuro), "The Finnish Citizen: How a Translation Emasculated the Concept", Redescriptions 8, pp. 172-188 (2004), Frivilligt - jämlikt - samfällt: Föreningsväsendets utveckling i Finland fram till 1900-talets början med speciell hänsyn till massorganisationsprincipens genombrott (1987).
Bo Stråth is professor emeritus at CENS. He was in 2007–2014 Finnish Academy Distinguished Professor in Nordic, European and World History and Director of Research. 1997–2007 he was Professor of Contemporary History at the European University Institute in Florence, and 1990–1996 Professor in History at the University of Gothenburg. He is a principal investigator in the HERA Research Project, The Debt: Historicizing Europe's Relations with the 'South'. Bo Stråth’s research has focused on philosophy of history and political, social and economic theory of modernity, from a conceptual history perspective with special attention to questions of what keeps societies together or divides them, and how community is constructed. A special field of interest in this perspective is the history of European integration and the exploration of Europe in its global historical (19th–20th century) context through the method of conceptual history.