Dr. Leila Koivunen, University Lecturer, Research Fellow, Academy of Finland
E-mail: leila.koivunen[at]utu.fi
Tel.: +358 (0)2 333 5231
I hold a position as a University Lecturer at the Department of General History, but I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher for the Academy of Finland. I specialise in the history of exploration, the visual culture of the British Empire and museum studies.
My PhD research (examined and defended in 2006) was concerned with European exploration of the African interior in the latter part of the nineteenth century. I examined how British explorers – including such famous figures as David Livingstone and Henry M. Stanley – visualized the African interior and how the travel sketches, paintings and photographs they produced were transformed into the illustrations that appeared in popular travel books. The book, entitled Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts, was published by Routledge in 2009.
My current research project deals with intercultural image-making and representation in a Finnish context. My postdoctoral research concentrates on the history of "exotic", non-Western exhibitions in Finland from the 1870s to the 1930s. I am looking into the processes of selection, acquisition and the display of non-Western material cultures, as well as the responses they awoke. The study focuses on a number of different exhibitions, ranging from missionary exhibitions and artists' private collections of "exotica" to school museums and arts and crafts exhibitions.
I am a member of the Nordic network "Encountering Foreignness – Nordic Perspectives since the Eighteenth Century" which elaborates the concept of "foreignness". I am also taking part in a research project entitled "Empowerment and Disempowerment in Finland, 1550-1980", financed by the Academy of Finland.