Paolo Amorosa is an international lawyer researching on the intellectual history of the discipline. He is based at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki. His main current interest is international legal thought in the early 20th century in the United States and its interaction with religious discourse. He is in the course of completing his doctoral dissertation titled The American Project and the Politics of History: James Brown Scott’s Search for the Origins of International Law.
Cesare Cuttica teaches British History at Paris 8; held a Core Research Fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2017-2018); and currently collaborates with members of the Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History. He has written two monographs: Sir Robert Filmer and the Patriotic Monarch (MUP, 2012; Paperback 2015) and Anti-democracy in England 1570-1642 (OUP, 2022). He has also edited Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe with Glenn Burgess (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge, 2012); Patriarchal Moments with Gaby Mahlberg (Bloomsbury, 2016); Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Early Modern England, 1603-1689 with Markku Peltonen (Brill, 2019); and Crisis and Renewal in the History of European Political Thought with Laszlo Kontler and Clara Maier (Brill, 2021). Dr Cuttica’s main research interests lie in the history of ideas in early modern Britain and Europe. He has also written about the practice of history-writing, notably about the methodology of intellectual history.
Ainur Elmgren is a researcher affiliated with the Centre for Nordic Studies and the Network of European Studies at the University of Helsinki. She has a PhD in history from Lund University. She is currently participating in several research programmes at the University of Helsinki, such as “The Political Rhetoric of Isms” and “Driving Forces of Democracy”, with contributions to the fields of conceptual history and political history of the Nordic countries.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/0faf7ebb-b4d2-4f5f-b601-76dd34e7fee4
Dr. Elise Garritzen specializes in modern European historiography and book history and her interests are particularly in the practices of historical scholarship, professionalization of the discipline, formation of academic communities, and historical print-culture. Her post-doctoral project explores the use of paratexts in late-Victorian histories. She has published a monograph about Finnish historical expedition in Rome 1902–1914 and articles about historiography and paratexts.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/51b6ad7f-99b1-4a31-aa2e-6d008f087d23
Heikki Haara is a postdoctoral researcher at “The Reason and Religious Recognition”, The Academy of Finland’s Centre of Excellence. He defended his doctoral thesis entitled “Sociability in Samuel Pufendorf’s Natural Law Theory” (2017) in Helsinki. In 2013–2014 he was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on early modern moral and political thought, particularly on theories of sociability and social emotions. Currently, he is studying conceptions of esteem in the 17th century.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/77925f1b-0882-4cde-9f35-df0987ca1feb
Kaarlo Havu defended his thesis entitled “Between Concord and Discord, Juan Luis Vives on Language, Rhetoric, and Politics” at the European University Institute in Florence in 2015. He is mainly interested in the intellectual history of Early Modern Period and especially in the connections between rhetoric, political languages and political participation and performance. Currently he is interested in the political and rhetorical dimensions of the 16th century Republic of Letters.
Mikko Immanen defended his doctoral thesis (“A Promise of Concreteness: Martin Heidegger’s Unacknowledged Role in the Formation of Frankfurt School in the Weimar Republic”) in June 2017 in Helsinki. He spent the academic year 2015–2016 as a visiting scholar at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. Currently he is working on a post-doctoral project on Theodor W. Adorno’s ambivalent relationship to the tradition of conservative cultural criticism (Spengler, Klages, Gehlen). He specializes in the history of Critical Theory and Continental philosophy as well as in modern European intellectual history and German history.
Timo Kaitaro, PhD, is a clinical neuropsychologist and adjunct professor (docent) of the history of philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His publications include Diderot’s Holism: Philosophical Anti-Reductionism and Its Medical Background (Peter Lang 1997) and Le Surréalisme. Pour un realisme sans rivage (L’harmattan 2008) and numerous articles on the French Enlightenment, the history of the doctrines of cerebral localization and the philosophy of surrealism.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/50fad3f8-af37-4812-a4a5-56e2ef42d96a
Dr Jesse Keskiaho is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral researcher. His interests focus on late antique and early medieval intellectual history and manuscript studies. His monograph, "Dreams and Visions in the Early Middle Ages. The Reception and Use of Patristic Ideas, 400–900", was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. He is currently working on annotations in the early medieval manuscripts of the major works of Augustine of Hippo.
Pauli Kettunen is professor of Political History in the Social Science Faculty of University of Helsinki. He has mainly written on the intellectual and political history of the Cold War, Nordic welfare societies, labour movements, and globalisation.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/bd70f6e0-16a0-4262-ab00-80414499fffe
Martti Koskenniemi is Academy Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. He is presently leading a research project on “The History of International law: Empire and Religion”. Within that project Koskenniemi’s own research traces the development of thinking about the role of law in the international political world in 1300-1800. His research commences with an examination of arguments during late medieval state-formation, especially the “legists’” recourse to a political theology of French kingship in the 13th century. He also studies the influences of Spanish scholasticism, raison d’état –thinking and (especially) political economy in international law in the relevant periods. A key role is played by the traditions of "jus naturae et gentium" in Germany, "Droit public de l'Europe" in France and the royal prerogative in external affairs in Britain. The research focuses on how the idiom of ius gentium (“law of nations”) has been used in order to buttress state power and rights of property in Europe and the colonies.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/f024d707-c211-474e-8418-39a38ef5707c
Associate Professor Jussi Kurunmäki, University of Helsinki and Södertörn University Stockholm, is political scientist specialized in conceptual history of political thought and political rhetoric. He has published extensively on parliamentary democratization and the conceptual history of democracy and liberalism in Sweden and in Finland. He was the initiator and one of the editors of Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy (2010). Currently, he is co-editing the volume Democracy in Europe: A Conceptual History (Berghahn Books). Kurunmäki is the chairperson of the international network Concepta – International Research Seminars in Conceptual History and Political Thought. He is the leader of the project “State Night” in a New Light: A Transnational Perspective to Finnish Political Culture 1809 – 1863 (Swedish Literature Society in Finland).
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/82e608f7-7630-4038-9660-c603d597b52c
Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen is currently researching the relationships between the oral and literary and the vernacular and Latin-language cultures in the Middle Ages and the early modern age in Finland. His academic background is medieval research and he is an adjunct professor in European history at the University of Helsinki. He has earlier studied Latin secular poetry and satires from the 12th and 13th centuries. He has subsequently carried out research on chance, Fortune and concepts of providence in historiography from the 11th to 13th century and the relationships of oral and literary cultures. Lehtonen has written about medieval cultural history in Finland and studied the theoretical debate on rhetoric, poetics, the theory of language and semiotics.
Adriana Luna-Fabritius got her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, working on early-modern languages of natural law, republicanism, and political economy. She was appointed Assistant professor at History Department at the Centre for Economic Research and Education (CIDE) in Mexico and Member of the National Research System (SNI) in Mexico, before arriving at the University of Helsinki. There she has been working on the projects ‘Cameralism and Monarchism in the Eighteenth Century transnational Perspective’ and ‘Visions of Sociability in Early-Modern Neapolitan Political Thought’. She is member of the European Society for the History of Political Thought and the ‘International Research Network: Natural Law 1625-1850’.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/20eb9ea2-0fe6-4038-aff6-001de0142638
Vili Lähteenmäki (PhD 2009, docent 2014) works primarily on early modern metaphysics and philosophy of mind, in particular on theories of consciousness, attention, and perception. He has also published on the methodology of studying historical conceptions of subjectivity, e.g., “Subjectivity as a Non-textual Standard of Interpretation in the History of Philosophical Psychology” (with Jari Kaukua), History & Theory 49 (February) 2010: 21-37. He is one of the editors of a volume on the history of theories of consciousness (Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy, Springer, 2007) and a guest-editor (with Jari Kaukua) of a special issue Varieties of Subjectivity for the journal Vivarium (2014).
Jani Marjanen is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki from where he gained his PhD in 2014. In 2014-2015 he was visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. He specializes in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century language of economic patriotism in Scandinavia, the theory and method of conceptual history, and public debate in Finland in the nineteenth century. He is one of the editors of Contributions to the History of Concepts.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/bc7769e1-9429-4da6-8ab0-956d655256f5
https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/contributions/contributions-overview.xml
Heikki Mikkeli is professor of history. He works in the intersection of the history of ideas and history of science. Recently he has specialized in the the history of internationalism and transnationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/b2ca69b9-058a-4d10-a467-f1190721e35b
Virpi Mäkinen, Ph.D. (theology), is University Lecturer in Theological and Social Ethics and Vice-Director of Centre of Excellence in Reason and Religious Recognition, Academy of Finland (2014–2019). She is interested in medieval and early modern moral philosophy and political thought, with a particular focus on the theories of natural law and rights, property rights, the history of poverty, the Franciscan Order, the Scholasticism from the Middle Ages to the Spanish neo-Thomism as well as the humanist and Protestant thought. As for human rights, she especially am interested in the recognition of the minority rights (e.g. the Roma) and the rights with citizenship.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/a081738d-1d1b-43b2-9845-89a1cc583e6a
Ere Nokkala's main research interests are in eighteenth-century German and Swedish intellectual history. Currently, he is working on cameral sciences in a European perspective. Together with Domink Hünniger and Nicholas Miller, he directs a newly established Research Network "Cameralism across the World of Enlightenment: Nature, Order, Diversity, Happiness" at the Lichtenberg Kolleg – The Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. Prior to his stay in Göttingen he worked as Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki (2012-2014) conducting research on eighteenth-century Swedish republicanism.
Stefan Nygård is an intellectual historian with a special focus on the socio-cultural history of intellectuals in Finland, Scandinavia and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has worked and taught on these topics at the University of Helsinki and the European University Institute. He is currently involved in research projects on Asymmetries in European intellectual Space (Academy of Finland), The Debt: Historicizing Europe's relations with the 'South' (HERA) and Minority, Nation and the World (Academy of Finland).
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/35fce034-7a76-4066-8dfc-c3a9921220a0
Sami Outinen is a post-doctoral researcher of political history and social science historian at the University of Helsinki. His main research interests are the history of Social Democracy as well as transnational employment-related policies and concepts especially from the Nordic point of view. Outinen currently works with his postdoctoral project Social Democrats and Employment in Sweden and Finland 1975–1998. He also researches the history of labour market activation policy in Finland in a project Osallisuuden toteutuminen työelämää koskevissa ongelmanasetteluissa ja ratkaisumalleissa. Outinen’s major publications include article From Steering Capitalism to Seeking Market Acceptance – Social Democrats and Employment in Finland 1975–1998. Scandinavian Journal of History, Vol. 42, 4/2017 (389−413), dissertation Sosiaalidemokraattien tie talouden ohjailusta markkinareaktioiden ennakointiin. Työllisyys sosiaalidemokraattien politiikassa Suomessa 1975–1998 (Into Kustannus 2015).
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/26855764-b1d4-4ad1-ad7c-011e42ae04b7
Timo Pankakoski is a postdoctoral researcher working mostly in modern German intellectual history, political theory, radical conservatism, conflict theory, conceptual history and metaphor studies. After obtaining his PhD (political science, University of Helsinki, 2013), Pankakoski has worked for the Academy of Finland research project “The Intellectual Heritage of Radical Cultural Conservatism” at the University of Jyväskylä and as a University Lecturer (acting) at the Network for European Studies, University of Helsinki. His publications include “Conflict, Context, Concreteness: Koselleck and Schmitt on Concepts” (Political Theory, 2010), “Carl Schmitt Versus the ‘Intermediate State’: International and Domestic Variants” (History of European Ideas, 2013), “Reoccupying Secularization: Schmitt and Koselleck on Blumenberg’s Challenge” (History and Theory, 2013), and “Containment and Intensification in Political War: Carl Schmitt and the Clausewitzian Heritage” (forthcoming in History of European Ideas).
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/e2dcc356-8df3-4a71-b796-95e764f6d60d
Academy Professor Markku Peltonen specializes in early modern intellectual history. His publications include Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cambridge University Press, 1996), The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He has been Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Visiting Professor at Northumbria University. He has held visiting fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge; CRASSH, University of Cambridge; The Huntington Library; Trinity College, Cambridge. During the academic year 2017-18 he will be Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington Library. He is completing his current book project, Republicanism, Democracy and Political Accountability in Revolutionary England. The project will provide a major reinterpretation of political thought in England during the revolutionary decades of the 1640s and 1650s. It argues that republicanism and its role in the political thought of the period has been misunderstood and that historians have ignored the importance of democracy in the same period. The project will also bring into focus for the first time the debate about political accountability – how political power and magistrates could be controlled.
Heikki Pihlajamäki is currently working on a monograph on legal communication in early modern Europe, from the specific view-point of German, Swedish, and Livonian law in the seventeenth century. As for the Centre of Excellence, he does research on the roots of premodern European legal positivism and on the history of codification in Europe. Together with profs. Serge Dauchy (Lille), George Martin (Gent) and Anthony Musson (Exeter) has a research project called "150 Books that Made Western Law", which aims at a Western history of the influence of legal books.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/edaae098-e5d5-4d7f-9157-8d2df64111f4
Markku Roinila's primary area of interest is Early Modern philosophy, especially Leibniz, and to lesser extent Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes and Locke. He has led an independent post-doc project, titled ”G. W. Leibniz on Emotions and Perfectibility of Man” 2011-2013 (funded by Academy of Finland). He is a board member of the Finnish Society for the History of Science and Learning and was a head of organizing committee of 26th Baltic Conference on the History of Science.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/792df5cd-440a-434b-909b-2f3ebd1cf7b6
Risto Saarinen is Professor of Ecumenics at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Academy of Finland's Centre of Excellecnce "Reason and Religious Recognition" (2014-2019). In addition to his ecumenical and theological studies, he has published two monographs on the interpretation history of Aristotle's akrasia or "weakness of will". His most recent book is "Recognition and Religion" (Oxford 2016). Saarinen is one of the editors of the forthcoming Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Martin Luther. He is member of Academia Europaea and global Lutheran-Orthodox Joint Commission.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/c7ede4fd-7cdb-46f0-8ee2-29df28265c12
Kari Saastamoinen is a professor of general history at the University of Helsinki. His main field of study is early modern political thought, especially the natural law tradition, but he has also worked on classical political economy and liberal political tradition.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/10f3cbea-3216-49cf-96cc-ae6c7d8a7951
Sami-Juhani Savonius-Wroth specialises in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of early-modern Europe and colonial America, especially the history of early-modern
political thought.
José Filipe (Pereira da) Silva is Associate Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki. He has published extensively on medieval theories of perception, natural philosophy, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of Robert Kilwardby on the Human Soul. Plurality of Forms and Censorship in the Thirteenth Century (2012) and co-editor of the volume Active Perception in the History of Philosophy. From Plato to Modern Philosophy (Springer 2014). He currently leads the European Research Council funded project Rationality in Perception: Transformations of Mind and Cognition 1250-1550.
http://www.helsinki.fi/theoreticalphilosophy/staff/index.html
http://375humanistia.helsinki.fi/humanistit/jose-filipe-silva
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/7f462c0d-d737-4d27-b57f-8d6a3841bd65
Koen Stapelbroek is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Associate Professor of the History of Political Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam and co-Director of the Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2004), published Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto, 2008) and a range of articles and edited volumes on European eighteenth-century political thought. He is currently completing a monograph on the neutrality of trade and the Dutch Republic and an edited volume on the politics of commercial treaties in the long eighteenth century.
Johan Strang, University Lecturer at the Centre for Nordic Studies, is interested in the intellectual and political history of 20th century Scandinavia. His publications include studies on the history of analytic philosophy, Scandinavian Legal Realism, the Nordic welfare state, Nordic democracy and Nordic cooperation. Together with Stefan Nygård he has also contributed to the discussion on transnational intellectual history with a small state perspective (Journal of the History of Ideas, 2016:1).
Professor Mikko Tolonen is an intellectual historian who works in the field of digital humanities. His monograph, Mandeville and Hume: Anatomists of Civil Society, published in Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment in 2013 combined the study of history of philosophy and book history. Tolonen is a PI in a Academy of Finland funded project that studies Finnish knowledge production and he continues his work on Hume, Mandeville, the Enlightenment and book history also in multidisciplinary projects that use computational methods.
http://375humanistia.helsinki.fi/en/humanists/mikko-tolonen
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/digital-humanities-helsinki
Dr. Kaius Tuori is currently an Academy of Finland Research Fellow. His research interests include legal history, Roman law, legal anthropology, classical archaeology, and their intellectual history. His book “Ancient Roman Lawyers and Modern Legal Ideals”, published by Vittorio Klostermann, explores how modern law affected the history of ancient Roman law. His latest book, “Lawyers and Savages: Ancient History and Legal Realism in the Making of Legal Anthropology” was published by Routledge in 2014. He holds a doctorate in Law and a M.A. in History from his studies at the universities of Helsinki, Finland, and La Sapienza in Rome, Italy.
Soile Ylivuori recently defended her doctoral dissertation examining politeness as a set of discourses and practices creating gendered identities, as well as the role of individuals in the process of identity construction, at the University of Helsinki. Her current research project, funded by the H2020 Marie Curie fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London and the Academy of Finland, investigates the intersections of race and nationality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies.
Docent, university lecturer Thomas Wallgren teaches philosophy. He is interested in the discourse of modernity, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, the philosophy of philosophy, G.H. von Wright, Europe, Gandhi, and in the theory and practice of sceptical enlightenment and swaraj. He is the director of the von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki and of the research project "The Creation of Wittgenstein" (Academy of Finland, 2016-2020). Wallgren is the author of Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein and the democratic spirit of philosophy (Lexington 2006).
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/11e8e7a3-37a8-4a45-852e-59dd9f979703