About

I am a literary scholar and currently work as a Research Council of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher.

My academic and personal background is deeply transnational: after completing a B.A. and M.A. in Finland, I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon in 2020 and have since held visiting scholar positions at Cornell University, Ohio State University, Uppsala University (Sweden), and the University of Oslo (Norway).

I specialize in American and Nordic literatures of the twentieth century and my research interests include transnational modernism, minority literatures, intersectional / feminist theory, narrative theory, cultural histories of racism and antiracism, and antiracist pedagogy.

As a comparatist trained both in Europe and the US, I have always mediated between different fields of inquiry in both my research and teaching. This is evident in my ongoing postdoctoral project, The Black Renaissance and Its Nordic Affiliations, where I bring literary and social sciences methods together to study how debates regarding race, racism, and equity traveled through literature between the US and the Nordic countries in the twentieth century. I have gathered fiction, autobiographical writing, newspaper reporting, and archival documents from Black America and the Nordic countries in order to trace the long transnational history of struggles against racial inequality. More on my project and publications here.

I am a recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Research Council of Finland, and the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. Currently, I am co-director of the Intersectionality in Research Network, which brings together scholars from various disciplines working on intersectional approaches to research and activism.