Charlotta Wolff is Docent of European history and Academy of Finland Research Fellow (2013–2018) at the University of Helsinki. She earned her doctoral degree in 2005 with a thesis on the Swedish political elite's relations with eighteenth-century France and French intellectuals in the second half of the eighteenth century. Her book Vänskap och makt. Den svenska politiska eliten och upplysningstidens Frankrike (Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2005) was awarded by the Swedish Academy in 2006. Her second monograph Noble conceptions of politics in eighteenth-century Sweden, ca. 1740–1790 (Finnish Literature Society, 2008) was a study in conceptual and intellectual history. In addition to numerous articles on transfers of ideas and people between Scandinavia and the French cultural sphere, she has also published on nineteenth-century elite identities from an agent’s perspective and on elite cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. After working as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow with the project Comic Opera and Society in France and Northern Europe 1760–1790 (2013–2018), which examines opera as a means of popularising philosophical and political themes, Wolff is acting professor of Finnish history at the University of Turku since August 2018. As the principal investigator of the academy project Agents of Enlightenment: Changing the Minds in Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe she is preparing an extensive study of Swedish ambassador, minister and university chancellor Count Gustav Philip Creutz (1731–1785) as a socialite, freethinker and materialist.
Sophie Holm is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Helsinki and a member of the Academy of Finland research project Agents of Enlightenment. Changing the Minds in Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe (2018–2020). She graduated in 2010 with a master's thesis on the onomastics of defensive constructions in the eighteenth-century sea fortress Sveaborg. In 2012, she edited a volume presenting new research on the said fortress. Her doctoral thesis, successfully defended in December 2019 at the University of Helsinki, examined the practices of early-modern diplomacy through a case study on foreign envoys in Stockholm during the Diet of 1746–1747. Within the project Agents of Enlightenment she has broadened her research to the cultural history of diplomacy in the Baltic Sea area. Holm has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Finnish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies since 2012 and its ISECS Delegate 2017-2019. She is now a member of the Executive Committee of the ISECS.
Researcher Profile and publications
Elina Maaniitty is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki. She graduated in 2015 with a master’s thesis on mortality and causes of death in Helsinki during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a subject on which she has also published two refereed articles. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on the prevalence of four epidemic diseases and the measures taken to prevent and combat them in Sweden and Finland during the long eighteenth century. As a member of the Academy of Finland research project Agents of Enlightenment: Changing the Minds in Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe, Maaniitty aims to combine demographic data and historical epidemiology with an analysis of paradigmatic changes in medical thought. Specific areas of interest include the history of smallpox inoculation, the dissemination of new scientific information, and key figures of Swedish medical science of the era.
Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen is professor of Finnish history at the University of Turku. In her research, she has gathered strong expertise on economic and gender history, particularly female entrepreneurship and professional work. Professor Vainio-Korhonen is also an expert on digital humanities issues, which are part of her tasks as a vice president of the Advisory council of the Finnish National Archives. Her most recent articles are “Women and Professional Ambitions in Northern Europe, c. 1650–1850” (together with Johanna Ilmakunnas and Marjatta Rahikainen) and “Midwives: Birthing Care Professionals in Eighteenth-Century Sweden and Finland”, both in Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, c. 1650–1850 (Routledge 2017) and "From Household Economy to Family Business" (together with Jarna Heinonen) and "Statutory Invisibility: Urban Business Women's Legal and Political Rights" (together with Jarkko Keskinen), both in Women in Business Families from Past to Present (Routledge 2018). She has also published a monograph in Swedish on the eighteenth-century midwifery, De frimodiga: Barnmorskor, födande och kroppslighet på 1700-talet (SLS 2016). In the Agents project, Vainio-Korhonen focuses on the place of formal knowledge in the training of midwives, who became public office holders, and on midwives as purveyors of new knowledge.