I am a University Researcher and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant, “Death, Smoke, and Mirrors: Manipulation of Health Data in Liberal and Authoritarian Custodial Institutions” (2024-2029). The project explores how penal authorities conceal prisoners’ poor health, focusing on British metropolitan, Indian colonial, American, and Soviet-Russian prisons and camps.
I am the technical assistant for the ERC project Death, Smoke, and Mirrors. I am a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki in the Political, Social, and Regional Changes Doctoral Programme (PYAM). I research memory politics and carceral practices, using my dissertation to focus on the ways in which the Russian Prison Service contends with and instrumentalizes its history.
I am a researcher with more than 70 published books and articles about migration and foreign expatriates in Russian Empire and Grand Duchy of Finland, forced migration and interned civilians during the World War I and II, commemoration of dead on the field, Finnish and Soviet prisoners of war, forced migration and cross-national relations in the POW camps, archival research, archival studies, as well as military and cultural history. For the Death, Smoke, and Mirrors project I act as Research Coordinator, conducting archival research in Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, focused on the Soviet Gulag case study