If you're looking for an expert to interview, visit our Media page and see the research profiles below for our researchers' specialty areas and contact information.
Dr Kaius Tuori is the director of subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. He is a Professor of European Intellectual History at the University of Helsinki. He is a scholar of legal history involved in research projects on the understanding of tradition, culture, identity, memory and the uses of the past. He is also the director of the ERC-granted research project Law, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Tradition (SpaceLaw).
Kaius Tuori will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in Finnish, English and limitedly in Swedish.
Keywords: general history, politics of history, identity, justice and its history, antique and its after-effect.
Dr Pamela Slotte is the director of subproject 2, Discovering the Limits of Reason - Europe and the Crisis of Universalism. She is Professor of Religion and Law in Åbo Akademi University. A scholar of theology and law, she has worked on topics of theological ethics and philosophy of religion, history of ideas, political theology, human rights, as well as the field of law & religion more broadly.
Pamela Slotte will gladly comment on current topics related to her research via e-mail in Swedish, English, Finnish and German.
Keywords: freedom of religion and conscience, history and theory of human rights.
Dr Reetta Toivanen is the director of subproject 3, Migration and the narratives of Europe as an "Area of freedom, security and justice". She is Professor of Sustainability Science (indigenous sustainabilities) at the Helsinki University Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), and the leader of ALL-YOUTH consortium funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland. Toivanen is docent in social and cultural anthropology at the Universities of Helsinki and Eastern Finland and a non-resident research fellow at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI). She is a scholar of anthropology and law involved in research projects addressing power and inequality, culture and identity and Arctic studies.
Reetta Toivanen will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in Finnish, English, Swedish and in German.
Keywords: sustainable development, youth perspective, refugees, minorities, human rights from non-lawyer perspective, immigration, mandatory Swedish in Finnish schools, regional minorities, sámi people.
Dr Ville Erkkilä is the team leader of subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. He is a university researcher at the Centre for European Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki. He has a background in legal history and intellectual history. His research focuses on history of historiography, conceptual history, affective history, and more specifically, on the legal historiography of East Germany.
Ville will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in Finnish and English.
Keywords: the use of history in ideologies/ideologically, anti-EU.
Dr Marco Piasentier is the team leader of subproject 2, Discovering the Limits of Reason - Europe and the Crisis of Universalism and a University Researcher at the Centre for European Studies (University of Helsinki).
His disciplinary background is philosophy, and his work chiefly focuses on themes in Post-Kantian European philosophy, social & political thought, and the history of 20th Century philosophy, analytic and continental.
Marco will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in English and Italian.
Keywords: 19th and 20th Century European philosophy, genealogy, biopolitics, science and critique, ‘end of metaphysics.’
Dr Miika Tervonen is the team leader of subproject 3, Migration and the narratives of Europe as an "Area of freedom, security and justice". He is a university researcher at the Centre for European Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki. He also leads the research project ”Gatekeeping the Nation: Deportation at Finnish Borderscapes from the Cold War to Europeanisation” (GATE, Academy of Finland 2022-2026). Miika's research focuses on histories of migration, minority politics and borders, as well as on nationalism and historiography. His is currently working on a book ”Writing the Past White: Nation, Race and Coloniality in Finnish National Histories”.
Miika Tervonen will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in Finnish and English.
Keywords: migration, borders, deportation, minorities, nationalism, and historiography.
Dr Paolo Amorosa is a university lecturer at the Faculty of Law and an affiliated researcher working on subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. He has a background in international law, law and religion, and legal theory. His research deals primarily with the history of international law and human rights in the twentieth century.
Paolo Amorosa will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in English.
Keywords: international law and politics, human rights, international institutions from both contemporary and historical perspective, especially in the context of USA and Italy.
Dr Jacob Giltaij (MA, Ph.D.) He is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for European Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki. He has a background in Roman law, legal history and international law, but is interested in the wider implications of the relation between law, legal science and developments in history and society.
Jacob Giltaij will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in English.
Keywords: human rights from a historical perspective, refugee research, refugee researchers, roots of identity politics.
Dr Timo Miettinen is a university researcher in subproject 2, Discovering the Limits of Reason - Europe and the Crisis of Universalism. He is docent at the University of Helsinki and the director of the research project Between Law and Politics: Rethinking the Intellectual Foundations of the European Economic Constitution (funded by the UHEL). He is a scholar of philosophy and European studies and has worked on the topics of history, politics, universalism and liberalism.
Timo Miettinen will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in Finnish and English.
Keywords: European Union, Europe, European politics, national politics of EU countries, European ideas and narratives, history of Europe, economic politics of the EU, European ideologies.
Dr Zoë Jay is a post-doctoral researcher in subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. She has a background in international relations and political science. Her research focuses on European politics, human rights, and the politics of international law, especially compliance with the European Court of Human Rights.
Zoë Jay will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in English.
Keywords: international law, international politics, European politics, compliance, relationships between national and European legal cultures, UK-Europe politics and Brexit, human rights, politics of Eurovision.
Dr. Karolina Stenlund is a post-doctoral researcher in subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. She holds a Doctor of Laws from Uppsala University and has been a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School. Her interests lie within the field of legal history, human rights, EU constitutional law, CLS/Crit, and civil law. She is currently working on a project where she critically analyzes the uses of Holocaust memory in EU lawmaking.
Keywords: Legal History, Holocaust memory, Shoah, EU, European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights, Tort Law
Dr Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz is a Maria Zambrano fellow at the University of the Basque Country and an affiliated researcher working on subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. She is a legal historian and a classical archaeologist whose research focuses on maritime archaeology, ancient law, and legal anthropology. She has published extensively on Roman Law and its maritime focus. She is the editor of two volumes, Roman Law, and Maritime Commerce (EUP 2022) and Seafaring and Mobility in the Late Antique Mediterranean (Bloomsbury 2022). She is also the author of one monograph Shipwrecks, Legal Landscapes and Mediterranean Paradigms: Gone under Sea (Brill 2022).
Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in English.
Keywords: maritime archaeology, ancient law, legal anthropology.
Tuuli Talvinko is a doctoral candidate in subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. She has a background in law and her research focuses on the principle of rule of law in the European Union.
Keywords: European union, constitutional law, legal theory, contemporary legal history
Marianne Sandelin (M.A) works as a doctoral researcher in the Doctoral Programme of Political, Societal and Regional Change (political history) and is affiliated with subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. She has a background in intellectual history and political philosophy. In her dissertation, she explores the philosophical roots of European conservatism by examining the political thought of Joseph de Maistre. Her research interests include The Enlightenment, the Counter-Enlightenment(s), universalism, political rationalism, pluralism, and the interrelations between different ideologies.
Keywords: intellectual history, history of European political thought, political philosophy, political ideologies, liberalism, conservatism, universalism, pluralism, political rationalism, the Enlightenment, the Counter-Enlightenment(s), the French Revolutions and the political history of France.
Alina Hruba is a doctoral researcher in subproject 1, Law and the Uses of the Past. Her research interest is the study of access to justice in Ukrainian court through the prism of the European dimension of the rule of law. She focuses on examination of the right to be heard and the vulnerability of going to Ukrainian courts in times of crisis by combining legal analysis, qualitative fieldwork, and sensory jurisprudence approaches.
Keywords: access to justice, rule of law, sensory jurisprudence, socio-legal studies
Dr. Minna-Kerttu Kekki is a post-doctoral researcher in subproject 2, Discovering the Limits of Reason – Europe and the Crisis of Universalism. She is a political and educational philosopher, whose work focuses on media-based publicness, political phenomenology, and collective memory. Her research particularly addresses Edith Stein’s interwar theory on collectives and the state, the appearance of others in media-based encounters, and the memories of Ingrians and Estonians in the Soviet Union. She is currently working on a book “Public discussions in media: The concept, the experience, and a place for learning”. For more information, see personal website minnakerttumaarjakekki.blogspot.com.
Minna-Kerttu Kekki will gladly comment on current topics via e-mail or phone in Finnish, English, and Estonian (limitedly in Swedish and German).
Ville Louekari (M.A.) is a Doctoral Researcher in subproject 2, Discovering the Limits of Reason – Europe and the Crisis of Universalism. He works across the fields of history of philosophy, continental philosophy and critical theory. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the concepts of universalism and utopia.
Aada Pettersson is a doctoral candidate in Subproject 2, Discovering the Limits of Reason – Europe and the Crisis of Universalism. She has a background in Classical Greek and European studies. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the notion of civil strife in European political thought.
Dr. Kolar Aparna is a postdoctoral researcher in sub project 3, Migration and the narratives of Europe as an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.
She is a woman of colour with a background in performing arts and geography. Her work is focused on producing situated knowledges on borders, displacement and mobilities that move relationally across spatio-temporalities of imperial, colonial and settler legacies shaping the present.
Her research with EuroStorie investigates shadow narratives of Europe in relation to and from displacements across colonial difference during the end of World War II and more recently.
Keywords: displacement, situated knowledges, borders, colonial difference
For more information, see Aparna's research portal: [https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/kolar-aparna/publications/]
DSocSc Matti Välimäki is a researcher in subproject 3, Migration and the narratives of Europe as an "Area of freedom, security and justice". He is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for European Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki. He is part of the Academy of Finland-funded research project ”Gatekeeping the Nation: Deportation at Finnish Borderscapes from the Cold War to Europeanisation” (GATE, 2022-2026).
Välimäki's areas of expertise include the development migration politics and legislation, forced migration, and public officers’ practices regarding foreigners. In addition, he specializes in science communication and research on political communication and political parties.
Matti Välimäki will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in Finnish and English.
Keywords: Migration, refugees, political parties, political communication, populism, history
Ali Ali is a PhD student in subproject 3, Migration and the narratives of Europe as an "Area of freedom, security and justice". He has a background in political science and gender studies. Ali's current research looks into issues of belonging, community and solidarity across political and social categorizational lines in the lives of exiles who identify as sexually non-normative.
Ali Ali will gladly comment on current topics related to his research via e-mail.
Keywords: community-(building/formation), exile, identification, precarity, sexual non-normativity, sense of belonging, socio-political engagement and alternatives, solidarity, vulnerability.
Laura Sumari is a PhD student in subproject 3, Migration and the narratives of Europe as an "Area of freedom, security and justice". Her mains themes of interests include mobilities, security and postcolonial theory, and in her doctoral dissertation she examines refugee narratives of Europe from a human security perspective.
Laura Sumari will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in Finnish and English.
Keywords: immigration, refugees, human/humane security and insecurity and the experience of security and insecurity.
Floris van Doorn is a doctoral candidate in sub-project 3, Migration and the Narratives of Europe as an Area of freedom, security, and justice. He holds an MSc in International Relations Theory from the London School of Economics. His doctoral research seeks to locate the EU’s external migration policies in both place and time, with a particular focus on the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF for Africa).
Floris van Doorn will gladly comment on current topics for all forms of media in English.
Keywords: ‘The International’, Empire, Frontiers, European Union, Governmentality, Genealogy
Vera Lampila works as a research assistant at the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives under the subproject 1: Law and the Uses of the Past. Vera is currently pursuing her master's degree in Political and Organizational studies.
Contact information: vera.lampila@helsinki.fi
Anna Kananen works as a research assistant at the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives. She works mainly for subproject 2: Discovering the Limits of Reason - Europe and the Crisis of Universalism. Anna has a background in world politics and is currently pursuing her master's degree.
Contact information for Anna Kananen.
Otso Metsola works as a research assistant at the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives. He works mainly for subproject 3, Migration and the narratives of Europe as "Area of freedom, security and justice". Otso is currently pursuing his master's degree in Global Development Studies.
Otso's contact information: otso.metsola@helsinki.fi
Tuija von der Pütten works as a project coordinator at the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives.
Contact information for Tuija von der Pütten.
Mai Tuori is the Puppy of Excellence at the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives. Her output for EuroStorie is to examine how to make people happy. She will focus equally on all the subprojects. Mai has a background in human resources, bones, eating shoes, and napping.