Curriculum vitae

Hanna Snellman CV (pdf)

Description of research and teaching

Hanna Snellman is Vice Rector and Professor of European Ethnology at the University of Helsinki. Snellman's research since the 1990s has focused on the ethnography of mobility, especially Finnish lumberjacks in Lapland and Finnish immigrants to Sweden and North-America, and the history and methodologies of European Ethnology. She is co-editor of the Journal of Finnish Studies, published in Texas, USA.

Her recent publications include an edited volume Transnational Death (Finnish Literature Society, 2019) co-edited with young scholars Samira Saramo and Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto. With so much of the global population living on the move, away from their homelands, and in diasporic communities, death and mourning practices are inevitably impacted. Transnational Death brings together eleven cutting-edge articles from the emerging field of transnational death studies. By highlighting European, Asian, North American and Middle Eastern perspectives, the collection provides timely and fresh analysis and reflection on people's changing experiences with death in the context of migration over time. Snellman's own article analyses burial wishes of Finnish immigrants in Sweden. 

Currently Snellman is working on a project on Finnish American cookbooks. She started the project while serving as Finnish Chair at Lakehead University, Canada, in 2007. In 2019, she was invited to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to find new research data, and in 2020 to the University of Washington, Seattle, with the same purpose. She has published an article  Cookbooks for Upstairs: Etnicity, Class, and Gender in Perspective (University of British Columbia Press 2018) on the topic so far.