Sari Kivistö is the PI and team leader of WP4. She is Academy Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Tampere University. She is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. Kivistö has previously worked as a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow. She was also Deputy Director and Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Kivistö has published extensively on interdisciplinary literary studies, literary history, and neo-Latin literature. Her books include Critical Distance: Ethical and Literary Engagements with Detachment, Isolation, and Otherness (2023), Neo-Latin Verse Satire, ca. 1500-1800. An Ethical Approach (2022), Lucubrationes Neolatinae. Readings of Neo-Latin Dissertations and Satires (2018), Kantian Antitheodicy. Philosophical and Literary Varieties (2016), Death in Literature (2014), The Vices of Learning. Morality and Knowledge at Early Modern Universities (2014), and Medical Analogy in Latin Satire (2009). In the current CoE project, she will continue to examine philosophical issues raised by literature, especially meliorism, suffering and antitheodicy in literature, thus contributing to a literary-philosophical in-depth analysis of the topic.
Natan Elgabsi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of WP4 of MePhiS. Elgabsi has previously worked as a Researcher in the project Doing Justice to Experience: Relations to the Difficult Past in History and Memory. His main research areas are the philosophy of historiography and the philosophy of writing (hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrativism), existential ethics, philosophy of history, the ethics of the human sciences, and memory studies. In particular, he has researched ideas about responsibility toward the past and ethical questions connected to historical writing and narration, with a focus on Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy.” He is the author of Existential Ethics and the Philosophy of Historiography: Transgenerational Life and Memory in Literary Culture (2025) and co-editor of Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A Cross-Cultural Approach (2023). Elgabsi is the co-founder and co-leader of Centre for research in Memory, Testimony and Historiography (MYTH) at Åbo Akademi University.
In MePhiS, he will research two interconnected themes: On the one hand, the ethical importance of the temporality of freedom in contrast to fatalist configurations of suffering. These configurations of fate are exemplified, for instance, in tragic narrative but also imported into ideas about historicity as questions of life allotment, moral luck, destiny, or the historical necessity of suffering. The ideas are critically discussed in existential moral philosophy with an emphasis on freedom for the sake of others as the increasing realization of responsibility. On the other hand, he will investigate the potentialities of dystopia and apocalyptic fiction precisely as an actualization of the reading subject’s freedom and responsibility to force the future against necessity and apocalypse.
Aleksei Rakhmanin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of WP4 of MePhiS. His background is in comparative religion, religious studies, and the philosophy of the humanities. In 2024, he defended his dissertation on the Wittgensteinian tradition in philosophy of religion. Since then, he has shifted toward the philosophy of literature within the Wittgensteinian tradition.
Rakhmanin's research at MePhiS focuses on two main topics. One is the modernist reciprocity between philosophy and literature. This reciprocity is evident in modernist narrative fiction, which contains philosophical insights and embodies specific philosophical techniques. While this is often true, Rakhmanin is interested in how literature independently poses and responds to issues at the core of modern philosophy. He approaches the philosophy of literature by considering literature an essential counterpart to philosophy, rather than merely an embellishment of it. The other topic is the ethics of literary narration in prose that deals with uprootedness — the state of displacement and existential exile resulting in the loss of memory, identity, the capacity to comprehend life, and the ability to use language — affecting individuals and collectives alike. Rakhmanin studies how modern prose elaborates on ways of narrating suffering and affliction, as exemplified in the works of Winfried Georg Sebald, Albert Camus, and Thomas Bernhard.
Ville Hämäläinen is a doctoral researcher of WP4 of MePhiS. He has published articles, for instance, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook and Frontiers of Narrative. Hämäläinen has been a recurrent visiting researcher at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen and at the department of Scandinavian Literatures at Aarhus University.
In MePhiS, Hämäläinen finishes a dissertation on Søren Kierkegaard as a literary author or a philosopher-novelist. Hämäläinen examines three literary devices, pseudonymity, polyphony and fictionality, not limited to Kierkegaard’s novels but also in his philosophical writings. More than pen names, Kierkegaard uses his pseudonyms as fictional characters. Each of them, then, presents a life-view, a truthful way of living, gained through trials and dialogue with competing life-views. Kierkegaard conveys his philosophically rich ideas through literary form, as it can best capture the experiential and existential accounts of human suffering. For the Kierkegaard research, this study provides new insights into Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity and revives the tradition of taking Kierkegaard’s literariness seriously. The dissertation enhances our understanding of fictionality by means of Kierkegaard’s multifaceted use. Drawing on the rhetoric of fictionality, this study contributes to the discussion of fictionality in philosophy of literature. Hämäläinen’s other research interests include examining the meliorist potential in German and Danish theories of imagination from Immanuel Kant to K. E. Løgstrup, and approaching imagination and faith as meliorist outcomes, depicted in late 19th-century and early 20th-century Danish Bildungsromane.
Enaiê Mairê Azambuja is a postdoctoral researcher in literature and environmental humanities, working at the intersection of ecopoetics, philosophy, and mystical traditions. Her research explores how modernist and contemporary American poetry responds to ecological crisis, planetary suffering, and the limits of language, with particular attention to absence, negation, and the ineffable.
Azambuja's previous research examined the influence of Zen Buddhism on early twentieth-century American poetry, bringing figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings into dialogue with posthumanism and new materialism. Published as a monograph with Routledge, this work explored how contemplative poetics decentre the human subject, acknowledge non-human agency, and foster engagement with ecological crisis. It also articulated a meliorist framework attentive to suffering without recourse to either redemptive optimism or despair.
At MePhiS, Azambuja develops a project titled "The Ineffable Word: Absence and Negation in Modernist and Contemporary American Ecopoetics". The project examines how poetic practices such as silence, ellipsis, fragmentation, and omission, shaped by traditions including Christian negative theology, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism, engage ecological suffering that exceeds descriptive language. Rather than treating absence and negation as failures of expression, the project approaches them as modes of contemplative attention, tracing how modernist ecopoetics register planetary vulnerability without resolving it into narratives of mastery, optimism, or despair. Aligned with MePhiS’s focus on suffering and meliorism, the project explores how poetry registers ecological loss while sustaining forms of attentiveness to more-than-human vulnerability.