Director:
- John Richardson (Musicology, University of Turku), john.richardson@utu.fi
Vice-Director:
- Mari Pajala (Media Studies, University of Turku), mari.pajala(at)utu.fi
Steering Group:
- Johannes Brusila (Musicology, Åbo Akademi University), jbrusila(at)abo.fi
- Kari Kallioniemi (IIPC Vice Director, Musicology, University of Turku), kakallio(at)utu.fi
- Kimmo Laine (Media Studies, University of Turku), kimmo.laine(at)utu.fi
- Susanna Paasonen (Media Studies, University of Turku), suspaa(at)utu.fi
- Mari Pajala (Media Studies, University of Turku), mari.pajala(at)utu.fi
- John Richardson (Musicology, University of Turku), john.richardson@utu.fi
- Hannu Salmi (Cultural History, University of Turku), hansalmi(at)utu.fi
- Jaakko Suominen (Media Studies, University of Turku), jaasuo(at)utu.fi
Task Group:
Johannes Brusila (Musicology, Åbo Akademi University), jbrusila(at)abo.fi
Pertti Grönholm (General History, University of Turku), pergro(at)utu.fi
Yrjö Heinonen (Musicology, University of Turku), yrjo.heinonen(at)utu.fi (retired)
Tuomas Hovi (Folkloristics, University of Turku), tuomas.hovi(at)utu.fi
Kirsi Hänninen (Folkloristics, University of Turku), kirsi.hanninen(at)utu.fi
Ralf Kauranen (Finnish Literature, University of Turku), ralf.kauranen(at)utu.fi
Kimi Kärki (Cultural History, University of Turku), kierka(at)utu.fi
Anu Lahtinen (University of Helsinki / University of Turku), anulah (at) iki.fi
Rami Mähkä (Cultural History, University of Turku), rami.mahka(at)utu.fi
Janne Mäkelä (Cultural History, University of Turku), janmake(at)iki.fi
Suvi Salmenniemi (Sociology, University of Turku), suvi.salmenniemi(at)utu.fi
Juha Torvinen (Sibelius Academy), juha.torvinen(at)utu.fi
Jukka Vahlo (Center for Collaborative Research, School of Economics, University of Turku), jukka.vahlo@utu.fi
Advisory Board:
Chair: Keijo Virtanen (University of Turku)
Bjørn Alterhaug (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway)
Feona Attwood (Middlesex University London, UK)
Philip Auslander (Georgia Insitute of Technology, USA)
Alf Björnberg (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
Gary Burns (Northern Illinois University, USA)
Wendy Chun (Brown University, USA)
Martin Cloonan (University of Glasgow, UK)
Sara Cohen (University of Liverpool, UK)
Mia Consalvo (Concordia University, Canada)
Mark Evans (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
Caryl Flinn (University of Michigan, USA)
Anthony Fung (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
Daniel Goldmark (Case Western University, USA)
Bridget Griffin-Foley (Macquarie University, Australia)
Susan Hayward (University of Exeter, UK)
Stan Hawkins (University of Oslo, Norway)
Amy Herzog (Queens College, NY, USA)
David Horn (Founding Director Institute for Popular Music, University of Liverpool, UK)
Shane Homan (Monash University, Australia)
Erkki Huhtamo (University of California, LA, USA)
Mark Katz (University of North Carolina, USA)
Serge Lacasse (Université Laval, Québec, Canada)
Claire Levy (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)
Ben Light (University of Salford, UK)
M. Eric Maigret (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)
Tony Mitchell (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Ingrid Monson (Harvard University, USA)
Justin O’Connor (Monash University, Australia)
Motti Regev (The Open University of Israel, Israel)
Gilbert Rodman (University of Minnesota, USA)
Derek Scott (University of Leeds, UK)
Roy Shuker (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Erik Steinskog (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Will Straw (McGill University, Canada)
Jenny Sundén (Södertörn University, Sweden)
Philip Tagg (University of Montreal, Canada)
T.L. Taylor (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Robert Walser (Case Western Reserve University, USA)
Mimi White (Northwestern University, USA)
Peter Wicke (Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany)
Liesbet van Zoonen (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
In memoriam
Ray Browne, 1922-2009 (founder of Popular Culture Association, founder and editor of Journal of Popular Culture and Journal of American Culture, Bowling Green State University, USA)
Scholars:
Kimmo Ahonen (University of Turku/Tampere University of Technology)
Kimmo Ahonen (PhD) has written several international articles about science fiction films and anti-Communism in 1950s American culture. His principal research interest focuses on the cultural history of the Cold War in the 1950s, and he has lectured on film history in the Department of General History at the University of Turku, as well as at the University Consortium of Pori. In June 2013 Ahonen successfully defended his dissertation thesis on the topic of “Cold War Anxieties and Fantasies: Alien Invasion in American Science Fiction Films of the 1950s” (In Finnish with an English Summary). Ahonen currently works as a development coordinator for Tampere University of Technology, at their site in Pori
Johannes Brusila (Åbo Akademi University)
Johannes Brusila, Ph.D. is curator and director of the Sibelius Museum, although he is currently working as the research director at the Department of Musicology, Åbo Akademi University. His research interests include popular music, the music industry, and cultural studies. Brusila is the author of Local Music, Not From Her: The Discourse of World Music examined through three Zimbabwean case studies: The Bhundu Boys, Virginia Mukwesha and Sunduza (Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology, 2003). Current research interests include the popular music of the Finland-Swedish minority (as a member of The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland’s project The Construction of Finland-Swedishness in Music).
Jelena Gligorijevic (University of Turku)
Jelena earned her BA degree in Music Pedagogy and Theory from the University of Arts in Belgrade (Serbia) in 2005. The shift in interest away from the positivist-formalist classical music analysis toward the cultural study of (popular) music urged her to enroll an MA in Popular Music Studies at the Institute of Popular Music (IPM) within the University of Liverpool (UK), which she successfully completed thanks to the American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) International Fellowship. She joined Turku University’s (UTU) musicology department as a PhD student in February 2011. Initially, she worked as an Open Society Foundations’ (OSF) fellow during the academic year 2011-12. She is presently a member of the Doctoral Program in Popular Culture Studies (PPCS) coordinated by UTU (2012-14), as well as a member of the Doctoral Program in Music Research (MUTO) coordinated by Helsinki’s Sibelius Academia (2015). Her PhD project is concerned with two major Serbian music festivals whose conceptual differences provide fruitful ground for an analysis of the multilayered relationships between culture, politics, and national identity in post-Milosevic Serbia. Her previous work experience has been rather diverse, covering several different roles in the fields of music education and music media.
Pertti Grönholm (University of Turku)
Pertti Grönholm, Ph.D. is a researcher and university teacher affiliated with Department of General History in the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies in the University of Turku. His research interests range from politics of history and memory (in Communism and Nationalism) to history of utopia and nostalgia and from history of music technology to popular music studies. Grönholm’s main subject in the area of popular culture is German electro group Kraftwerk that has not only been radical in its music and images, but in its relation to performance, pop-stardom, the media and the history of modernism.
http://www.hum.utu.fi/oppiaineet/yleinenhistoria/en/department/gronholm.html
Email: pergro(at)utu.fi
Heidi Hakkarainen (University of Turku)
Heidi Hakkarainen, MA, is a doctoral student in the PhD Programme for Popular Culture Studies (PPCS). My ongoing thesis project “Comical Modernity” focuses on popular humour in late nineteenth-century Vienna. My research combines history of the popular culture with urban history and explores how the urbanization and experience of modernity were negotiated and dealt with humour. I am based at the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku.
Outi Hakola (University of Texas / University of Helsinki)
Outi Hakola’s background is in film, television and literature studies. She has Master’s of Arts degrees in both Media Studies (2005) and Comparative Literature (2003) from the University of Turku, where she defended her dissertation, Rhetoric of Death and Generic Addressing of Viewers in American Living Dead Films, in 2011. Her PhD research analysed the rhetorical means of mediating death for horror film audiences. Currently, she is a university lecturer in North American Studies at the Area and Cultural Studies (University of Helsinki). She is also a docent in Area and Cultural Studies. Her research concentrates on questions of death, dying and mourning in fictive films and television drama. Her ongoing research project, Emotional Encounters with Death: Dramatizing Mourning in American Television Series (2013-2016), deals with encountering death and loss in HBO prime-time television drama. In this study she approaches the role of mourning in the television series and how fictive media can participate in the public discussion through affective narration. She is also part of the research project The Dark Side of Humor: Popular Culture and the Power of Ridicule (2016-) which looks at the intersection of humour and social control in contemporary society.
Benita Heiskanen (University of Turku)
Benita Heiskanen (Ph.D., American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2004) works as Director of the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku. She serves as Docent of American Studies in the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku and Docent of North American Studies in the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki. Her areas of interest include Transnational American Studies, U.S.-Mexico border region, USA-Cuba relations, race & ethnicity in the United States, U.S. Latino/as, popular culture, and sport. Methodologically, she specializes in ethnography, oral history, and visual analysis. Theoretically, she is interested in the geography of the body, space, and place; the ethics of looking; and race, class, and gender formations. Her recent work deals with experiences and representations of violence on the El Paso, Texas-Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua border between the United States and Mexico. She has written both about the femicides (feminicidio) that began in the 1990s and the so-called “drug wars” of the 21st century. Heiskanen is the author of The Urban Geography of Boxing: Race, Class, and Gender in the Ring (New York: Routledge, 2012; paperback 2014). Her recent edited volumes in Finnish include Mitä Matti tarkoittaa? Esseitä Matti Nykäsestä (Turku: Savukeidas, 2013) and Kiekkokansa (Helsinki: Teos, 2015), co-edited with Hannu Salmi.
Katriina Heljakka (University of Turku)
Katriina Heljakka (Doctor of Arts in visual culture, M.Sc. in both Art History and Economics) works as a postdoctoral researcher of digital culture at the Degree Program of Cultural Production and Landscape Studies at the University of Turku. Her doctoral thesis Principles of adult play(fulness) in contemporary toy cultures: From Wow to Flow to Glow, was examined at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2013. She serves as a member of the board for ITRA (International Toy Research Association), as chairwoman for both WIT (Women in Toys, Entertainment and Licensing) and the Finnish Doll Society. As a part of the Academy of Finland funded project Ludification and the Emergence of Playful Culture, Heljakka continues her research on toys, playfulness and the (material) cultures of play.
Outi Hupaniittu (University of Turku/University of Helsinki)
Outi Hupaniittu, PhD, is a film historian and an archivist. She earned her PhD in Finnish History from the University of Turku in 2013. Her dissertation focused on the economic history of early Finnish cinema business. In her post-doctoral research project in the University of Helsinki, she studies the stage actors who appeared in film during the 1920s and 1930s. Beside her dissertation, she has published several articles on the economic history of film, actors, stardom and audiences. She also holds a position at the National Archives of Finland, where she has for example focused on academic co-operation and the development of accessibility and usability of digitize cultural heritage.
Bruce Johnson (University of Turku/Macquarie University)
My interest in popular culture is as a way of tracing cultural history since the medieval period, and in particular through the field of acoustics: the role of sound in the confrontations which generated modernity as mapped through such demarcations as class, gender, nation state, race. This work involves such areas as literacy and literature as an information economy competing with sound, sound and visual technologies, the acoustics of the modern city, and music. Particular current areas of research include the history of the connections between music and violence, popular music and sexuality, regional popular musics especially jazz.
Kari Kallioniemi (University of Turku)
Docent of History of Popular Culture and Researcher in Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland. He is the author of Put the Needle on the Record and Think of England: Notions of Englishness in the Post-war History of British Pop Music (University of Turku, 1998). His contemporary work deals with the eccentricity in British (pop)stardom. E-mail: kakallio@utu.fi
Maiju Kannisto (University of Turku)
Maiju Kannisto, MA, works as a Researcher in Cultural History at the University of Turku. Her PhD work-in-progress, Mass Media and “Something Completely Different” – Changing Production Culture in Commercial Television, explores the change in Finnish television from the 1980s to the 2000s. She is a doctoral student in the ELOMEDIA Doctoral Program. She worked in multidisciplinary INTERMEDIA project (2008-2010) funded by Academy of Finland.
Tero Karppi (State University of New York at Buffalo & University of Turku)
Tero Karppi (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Media Theory at the Department of Media Studyies in State University of New York at Buffalo. His is titled Disconnect.Me: User Engagement & Facebook. Karppi has previously been a doctoral student in the ELOMEDIA Doctoral Program, a Hastac Scholar 2013 and a PhD intern at the Microsoft Research Social Media Collective for Summer 2013. Previously Karppi has worked as a researcher in Games as Services project in the Game Lab of University of Tampere. Karppi’s homepage is http://terokarppi.com
Ralf Kauranen (University of Turku)
Ralf Kauranen, researcher, PhD, is a sociologist based at the Department of Finnish Literature at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies of University of Turku. His research has in many ways been focused on the social dimensions of comics. In his doctoral thesis (Seriedebatt i 1950-talets Finland. En studie i barndom, media och reglering, 2008) Kauranen studied the critical debates on comics in 1950s Finland. The analysis, based on media and parliamentary debates and on the activities of child protection organizations, is focused on the understandings of comics and childhood in the debates, as well as on the measures taken to regulate the problem. At the moment Kauranen works in a project called Transnationalism in Finnish Literary Culture (Suomalaisen kirjallisen kulttuurin ylirajaisuus), funded by the Kone Foundation, in which he focuses on the transnationalism of the contemporary field of Finnish alternative comics. He also tries to find time for research on the use of comics as a tool of propaganda in Finland during World War II. Kauranen is a founding member of the Nordic Network for Comics Research, one of the editors of Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art, and a member of the editorial board of Sosiologia.
Pekka Kolehmainen (University of Turku)
Pekka Kolehmainen, M.A., is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku. His main research focus is on the cultural conflicts and rock music controversies in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. His dissertation explores media discussions surrounding rock music in this time period, and analyzes the processes through which the place of rock music was being negotiated in U.S. society and culture, linking them to the ongoing conflicts of the “Culture Wars.” In addition, research interests include the field of game studies, where they span from gaming culture and gaming-related controversies to the study of game sound and games as form of audiovisual media.
Johannes Koski (University of Turku)
Johannes Koski, MA, is a doctoral student in the PhD Programme for Popular Culture Studies, based at the University of Turku. By tracing the pop cultural history of Pokémon as well as employing the study of games and game characters, his thesis project examines the emergent and designed affective circuits of virtual intimacy in Pokémon characters across the franchise’s transmedia supersystem.
Kaarina Koski (University of Turku)
Kaarina Koski (PhD) is university lecturer in folklore studies at the University of Turku and docent of folklore studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research topics include popular religion, belief narratives and popular conceptions of death and the dead, as well as vernacular traditions emerging in YouTube and within fandoms both online and offline. She is interested in cultural changes and continuities, such as the decline and change of belief traditions, or, the transformations of folklore and vernacular expression from oral to written, videotaped and digital.
Antti-Ville Kärjä (Finnish Jazz & Pop Archive JAPA)
I work as Academy Research Fellow with a project entitled “Music, Multiculturality and Finland”. The project centres on how migrant groups challenge conventional conceptualisations of Finnish music, with a particular emphasis on the dynamics of ‘the popular’ and ‘the sacred’. The project is implicated also in questions about historiography of music, freedom of expression and the cultural politics of humour. In 2007 I was appointed an adjunct professor (“docent”) of the study of audiovisual media music in the University of Tampere, and in 2009, of popular music studies in the University of Helsinki.
Kimi Kärki (University of Turku)
Kimi Kärki (PhD) is a Research Fellow at Cultural History, University of Turku. In 2018 he was appointed Adjunct Professor (Title of Docent) at the Cultural Heritage Studies, University of Turku, with field of speciality being Popular Culture, especially the Cultural Heritage of Popular Music. He is the co-editor of Peter Gabriel from Genesis to Growing Up (Ashgate 2010, with Michael Drewett and Sarah Hill), and Made in Finland: Studies in Popular Music (Routledge 2020, with Toni-Matti Karjalainen). He has mainly published on the history stadium rock spectacles, talking machines, future imagining, and fascist aesthetics in popular culture. He is the principal investigator of the project Fascinating Fascism and its Affective Heritage in the Finnish Culture (Kone Foundation, 2021–2023). Currently he is funded by the project Talking Machines. Electronic voice and the interpretation of emotions and self-understanding in human-machine communication in 1960–2020 (Kone Foundation 2018–2022, PI: Adjunct Professor Pertti Grönholm). In 2017 he was the Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Case Western Reserve University Center for Popular Music Studies, Cleveland, USA. He has earlier worked in many positions at University of Turku, most recently as a University Lecturer & coordinator of IIPC, and European master’s programme European Heritage, Digital Media and the Information Society. His 2014 PhD is about the stadium rock stage design, stardom and aesthetics. During 2006 he spent six months as a Research Fellow in Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, UK. He is the Secretary of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), and Web/Publication representative at the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). He is also a touring and recording musician (Reverend Bizarre, Lord Vicar, Orne, E-Musigruppe Lux Ohr, Uhrijuhla, singer/songwriter), working with both electric and acoustic guitars. Visit his homepage at http://users.utu.fi/kierka/
Anu Lahtinen (University of Turku)
Anu Lahtinen is a Docent / Adj.Prof. at the Universities of Turku and
Helsinki. Her interests in popular culture are diverse. When it comes to more modern times, she has studied ironic dimensions in the performance of the American talk show host Conan O’Brien. One of her current projects includes a case study on the early years of cinema in an emerging local community (Hyvinkää) in Southern Finland. As an expert in medieval and early modern Swedish history, she takes interest in studying sixteenth century popular culture – handwritten songbooks and anecdote collections, for example. For a related project funded by the Academy of Finland, to be carried out in 2015-2020, see http://www.finlit.fi/en/letters-and-songs-registers-beliefs-and-expressions-early-modern-north
Kimmo Laine (University of Turku)
Kimmo Laine is a collegium researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) (from 2012 to 2014) and a lecturer of Film Studies at the University of Oulu. His ongoing research seeks ways to analyze film style with awareness of contextual factors. His previous research has mainly concerned the issues of national cinema. Besides a dissertation (”Starring the Finnish People” – the production companies Suomi-Filmi and Suomen Filmiteollisuus as builders of Finnish national cinema in 1933–1939, 1999, in Finnish) he has published, for example, a monograph on the history of military comedy (1994) and co-edited a series of anthologies on Finnish film makers Valentin Vaala (2004), Hannu Leminen (2008) and Matti Kassila (2013).
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki (University of Turku)
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, PhD, Adjunct Professor, works as a University Lecturer at the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku. Her main research interests cover cultural history of women’s writing, autobiographical sources and life-narratives as well as biographical research and feminist studies. She has published widely both in Finland and in international publications e.g. on the history of women’s writing, on methodological questions concerning biographical research and autobiographical (particularly epistolary) sources. She has mainly been working with 19th and early 20th century textual material, but she is currently interested also in life-narrative practices in popular culture, particularly in women artist’s lyrics. She has also written on films from women’s studies perspective. Academia.edu: https://utu.academia.edu/MaaritLeskel%C3%A4K%C3%A4rki
Sini Mononen (University of Turku)
Sini Mononen, MA, is a PhD student in musicology department in the University of Turku. Mononen is a status member of doctoral school for popular culture studies (University of Turku) and Finnish doctoral programme for music research (Sibelius Academy). She is working on with her dissertation focusing on audiovisual representations on stalking. Mononen is combining cultural research to the phenomenology of music. Her work is interdisciplinary as she is studying film, sound, music, violence and phenomenology of music.
Rami Mähkä (University of Turku)
MA Rami Mähkä is a researcher in Cultural History at the University of Turku. He is especially interested in post-war British popular culture. Mähkä is currently writing his doctoral thesis under a working title Monty Python, History and Comedy. The study is part of the research project Cinematic Cartographies of European History, 1945-2000, funded by the Finnish Academy. Email rami.mahka(at)utu.fi
Janne Mäkelä (University of Turku)
Janne Mäkelä, Ph.D., is adjunct professor of history of popular culture in Cultural History, University of Turku. He has mainly written on popular music, including John Lennon Imagined: Cultural History of a Rock Star (Peter Lang, 2004) and Pophistoria: Kuinka musiikki muutti maailman (“Pop History: How Music Change the World”, JAPA/Klaava e-book, 2014).
Raita Merivirta (University of Turku/La Trobe University)
Raita Merivirta, PhD, is a researcher in the Department of General History at the University of Turku. She is interested in Irish cinema and history and especially on screen depictions of Michael Collins and the Irish revolutionary period. She is the author of a monograph entitled The Gun and Irish Politics: Examining National History in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (2009) and a co-editor of Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945-2010 (Intellect, 2013). Merivirta’s other main area of interest is Indian literature in English, particularly the post-Midnight’s Children novel-as-history trend of the 1980s and 1990s.
Heta Mulari (University of Turku)
Heta Mulari’s (MA) ongoing doctoral research explores representations of girlhood in Swedish youth films in 1995–2005. She is interested in how these films have been circulated and referred to in media discussions about new feminisms, education and youth activism. The main objective in the research is to explore three intertwining cinematic images of Swedish girlhood: a girl feminist, a girl consumer and a girl in need of education. Heta’s research material consists of films, review journalism, media pedagogical publications, third wave feminist publications and commercial girls’ magazines. Her areas of research interest include girlhood studies, history of feminism and cultural history of film and media. She works in project Cinematic Cartographies of European History 1945–2000, funded by Academy of Finland.
Paavo Oinonen (University of Turku)
Paavo Oinonen, PhD, is specialised in the history of radio broadcasting. His PhD dissertation dealt with the Finnish radio entertainment during the post war years from the 1940s to the 1960s. He works as a University Teacher in Cultural History at the University of Turku.
Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku)
Susanna Paasonen works as professor of media studies and specializes in internet research, pornography, affect and popular media culture. Most recently, she is the co-editor of Pornification (Berg 2007) and Working with affect in feminist readings (Routledge 2010), as well as the author of Carnal resonance: Affect and online pornography (MIT Press 2011).
Mari Pajala (University of Turku)
Mari Pajala is senior lecturer at Media Studies, University of Turku. Her research focuses on television history, feminist studies of popular media and cultural memory studies. She has published for example on the history of the Eurovision Song Contest as a media event, memory cultures on contemporary television and class in Finnish popular media. During 2015-2017 she works as Government of Finland/David and Nancy Speer visiting professor in Finnish Studies at Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota.
Petri Paju (University of Turku)
Petri Paju is a post-doc researcher working in the project ‘Using IBM in Europe to recapture the lead? Co-constructing computer expertise in Europe and visions of European know-how through IBM and its technology’, see http://users.utu.fi/petpaju/ibm/. His doctoral dissertation (2008) deals with history of information technology and nationalism in the 1950s Finland: Building Ilmarinen’s Finland: The Committee for Mathematical Machines and computer construction as a national project in the 1950s (in Finnish). He has also written on how atomic technology in the mid-1950s was made a popular phenomenon.
Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton, UK/University of Turku) Professor Jussi Parikka teaches and writes on the cultural theory and history of new media. He studied cultural history at the university of Turku, Finland, and is currently Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Parikka has published widely on media archaeology, digital culture and cultural theory. Some of the books include Koneoppi (in Finnish, 2004) and the media ecology trilogy: Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007), Insect Media (2010) and A Geology of Media (2015). In addition to his monograph What is Media Archaeology (2012), he is the co-editor of Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (with Erkki Huhtamo, 2011). Most recently Parikka co-edited the first international collection of writings by and about Erkki Kurenniemi, the Finnish media art pioneer: Writing and Unwriting Media (Art) History (with Joasia Krysa, 2015). Parikka’s homepage is http://jussiparikka.net/.
Sanna Qvick (University of Turku)
Sanna Qvick (MA) is a doctoral student in musicology at JUNO (DoctoralProgramme in the University of Turku). Her doctoral thesis NarrativeStrategies of Soundtrack in Finnish Fairy Tale Films for Children focuses on narrative role of the music while highlighting the immersion powers of voice and effects. The material of Qvick’s research consists of a selection of six children¹s fairy tale films, which all are based on existing narration. Her methodology rests on close reading, narrative analysis, and concepts of perception and memory. Qvick is currently part of a research project in Finnish Contemporary Music in the 21st Century: Cultural and Social Significance of Art Music in the Postmodern World.
Inka Rantakallio (University of Turku)
Inka Rantakallio (MA) graduated from study of religions at the University of Helsinki, and is now a doctoral student in musicology at the University of Turku. Her ongoing PhD research is an interdisciplinary case study of Finnish underground rap artists and the discourses of authenticity and spirituality. Research material ranges from interviews with the artists to close readings of their music videos, observation at concerts and analysis of social media. Her article publications discuss various aspects of the intertwining of spirituality/religion and rap music.
John Richardson (University of Turku)
John Richardson is professor of musicology at the University of Turku in Finland. He has published on popular music, music and visual media, contemporary avant-garde music, and Finnish music. He is author of the books, An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Wesleyan University Press). In popular music studies he has published on performers including Gorillaz, KT Tunstall and Maija Vilkkumaa. He has contributed chapters to several existing and forthcoming collections, including The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, Musicological Identities: Essays in Honour of Susan McClary, Critical Musicological Reflections: Festschrift for Derek Scott, Music and the Idea of the North, Peter Gabriel, From Genesis to Growing Up, and The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Post-Minimal Music. For further bibliographical details, see http://www.hum.utu.fi/oppiaineet/musiikkitiede/en/richardson.html.
Tommi Römpötti (University of Turku)
Tommi Römpötti (PhD) is currently working as university lecturer of media studies. His research interests are especially film history, Finnish cinema, critical theory, youth culture, and recently class society and cinema. His PhD research, ”Aliens in their own country” – Finnish road movies from the 1950s to the 2000s as narratives of freedom and resistance (Nykykulttuuri 2012, written in Finnish), focused on road movie as a genre able to contest contemporary hegemony of the spectacle.
Suvi Salmenniemi (University of Turku)
Suvi Salmenniemi works as an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Turku and has a title of Docent of Sociology at the University of Tampere. She is specialising in political sociology, cultural studies, the sociology of class and inequality, and feminist research. Her current research projects deal with self-help literature and its consumption in Finland, Russia and the US, and with postfeminism in popular media culture. Before joining the University of Turku, she was a research fellow at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki (2009-2012). She is the author ofDemocratization and Gender in Contemporary Russia (Routledge, 2008) and the editor of Rethinking Class in Russia (Ashgate, 2012) and Näkymätön voimavirta: Näkökulmia venäläisten naisten kulttuurihistoriaan (together with Marja Rytkönen and Arja Rosenholm, forthcoming with Gaudeamus).
Hannu Salmi (University of Turku)
Hannu Salmi works as professor of cultural history at the University of Turku. He has written especially on film and media history, music history and the history of the nineteenth century. Recently, he is the editor of Historical Comedy on Screen; Subverting History with Humour. (Intellect,2011).
Jukka Sihvonen (University of Turku)
Jukka Sihvonen works as the professor of cinema studies at the School of Art Studies. His research interests include topics from film history and theory to media philosophy and education, and most recently problems of adaptation. Attached to these another work in progress is a study on the cinema of David Cronenberg with the title In the Lab of Desire.
Anna Sivula (University of Turku)
Anna Sivula is Doctor of Philosophy and Professor of Cultural Heritage at the Degree Program of Cultural Production and Landscape Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. In her recent studies, Sivula has concentrated on historiography, identity work of cultural heritage communities and the uses of history.
Jaakko Suominen (University of Turku)
Jaakko Suominen is Doctor of Philosophy and Professor of Digital Culture at the Degree Program of Cultural Production and Landscape Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. In his studies, Suominen has concentrated on the cultural history of information technology and the history of media and technology.
Juha Torvinen (University of Turku)
Juha Torvinen (Phd.) is Academy of Finland Research Fellow working at the Musicology department of the University of Turku. The title of his research project is Music, Nature, and Environmental Crises: A Northern Perspective on Ecocritical Trends in Contemporary Music. The areas of Torvinen’s academic expertise include ecomusicology, cultural music research, philosophy of music, phenomenological music research, contemporary classical music and progressive forms of rock and metal. Torvinen is also Docent/Adjunct Professor (Habilitation) of musicology, in Universities of Turku and Helsinki. For more information about Torvinen’s research and publications, see https://www.utu.fi/en/units/hum/units/musicology/department/staff/Pages/juha-torvinen.aspx
Susanna Välimäki (University of Turku)
Susanna Välimäki works as a senior lecturer of musicology at the University of Turku. Her main interests are contemporary music, auditory culture, film music and cultural music analysis. She is the author of the books Subject Strategies in Music: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Musical Signification (2005), Miten sota soi? Sotaelokuva, ääni ja musiikki (How Does War Sound? War films, Sound and Music], 2008), and The Music of Transformation: Queer and Ecological Utopias in Audiovisual Culture (2015).
http://www.utu.fi/en/units/hum/units/musicology/department/staff/Pages/susanna-valimaki.aspx
Annamari Vänskä (University of Turku)
Annamari Vänskä is Adjunct Professor of Fashion at the University of Turku where she is Collegium Researcher at Turku Institute for Advanced Studies. She is also Adjunct Professor of Art History and Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki where she was named Adjunct Professor of the Year 2012. Vänskä has published widely on fashion and visual culture. Her book, Muodikas lapsuus. Lapset muotikuvissa (Fashionable Childhood. Children in Fashion Advertising, Gaudeamus, 2012), was awarded an honorary mention as The Best Scientific Book of the Year” and is forthcoming in English. She is currently researching fashion consumption and pet dogs. Vänskä is also an independent columnist and curator of Boutique – Where Art and Fashion Meet (2012) that opened in Helsinki and travelled to New York, Washington, Tokyo and Berlin (2016).
Sari Östman (University of Turku)
Sari Östman is a PhD student in Digital Culture at the University of Turku. She is currently finishing her PhD thesis about life-publishing on the internet and will defend it during the spring term of 2015. Her expertize focuses on online cultures and personal activities among them. However, she is also more widely interested in life-telling practices and several contemporary phenomena which are connected to digital cultures. She has written several peer-reviewed articles about life-publishing and online research ethics and methods (latters together with colleague R. Turtiainen). She also has and will give teaching of and around these subjects. Her future interests and possible themes for post-doctoral research include promoting equality and well-being in digital environments and f. ex. micro-celebrity in social media circulating into mainstream media. Publications and more info in the blog: https://smostm.wordpress.com/artikkelit/.
IIPC 