Research in Focus
Our staff, especially teachers, post-doc researchers as well as post-graduate students, has many-sided resources to do, teach and supervise historical research. Topics under study stretch from medieval society and early modern social life to the economy and environmental issues of contemporary Finland. At the moment, our researchers are examining Finland in the globalising world, various aspects of technology also its relation to gender and everyday life, development of energy use, forest history, business history as actors’ network and social capital, military history, environmental history, labour movement’s history, taxation in the early modern period, agricultural and local history. Moreover, researchers are connected to various national and international research projects and participate in regional and global conferences.
A current trend is to pay more attention on the application of the methodological arsenal in historical research. In the most recent research projects, it is applied a network approach, ecobiographical approach, tools of gender studies, discursive analysis, comparative methods and methods of historical sociology for example. Meanwhile, we continue to write readable publications, which bring even distant and complex issues close to readers of the present. In several of our studies, experiences of ordinary people and their every day life are in focus. ‘New social history’ is gaining a foothold in our research. Macrohistorical changes are examined also from micro-historical angles and presented through the experience of common people, such as servant girls, hair-dressers, soldiers, and leisuretime photographers. However, we are not neglecting the life of the elite; some studies are analysing the life of arctic explorers, politicians, big businessmen as well as glamorous film stars, for instance.