Jonna Katto
20142023

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Description of research and teaching

 

RESEARCH

As a researcher, I work at the intersection of oral history, gender studies, and cultural history. My areal specialisation is in eastern and southern Africa.

I am currently an Academy Research Fellow, and I lead the project "Multiscalar gendered temporalities in southeastern African history: Oral voices, lived and inherited pasts, and the deep testimony of time in language" (GENTEMPO-Africa, 2023-2027).

This project explores the gendered temporalities of the long history of power in southeastern Africa. It is concerned with writing gendered histories beyond the chronologies and linear sequences that structure and limit our current understanding. Combining research on oral history and word histories, it studies the relation between individual lived time and the longterm and large-scale time of conceptual history.

The focus of the project is specifically on the deeper gendered histories of power in present-day Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania in southeastern Africa.

Overall, this project proposes that examining different timescales side by side allows for more complex narratives about gender and power in African pasts and presents.

Website of research project:
https://jonnakatto.com/gentempo-africa/

 

SUPERVISION

As a Supervisor for the Doctoral Programme in Gender, Culture, and Society, I am interested in supervising topics related to African gender studies and African gender histories. Oral history topics are especially welcome.

 

TEACHING

In the spring term of 2025, I will be teaching a course on “Gender and Identity in African Literatures”.

This course approaches African literature from a cultural studies perspective, exploring not only the aesthetics of the literary texts but also the ways they reflect the socio-political contexts and histories in which they are produced. We focus especially on questions of identity. African authors have intensely debated the meanings of the concepts ‘Africa’, 'race', ‘the nation’, and ‘ethnicity’. The choice of language has also been an issue of much discussion. In this course we attempt to bring these different debates together to explore relations between identity categories—in particular gender—and text and context in Africa. We focus on a broad range of texts, taking examples from short stories, novels, autobiographies, oral traditions/literatures etc. The course will be organized in three thematic blocks: (1) The Gendered Worlds of Women’s Writing, (2) Reading Masculinities, and (3) Queer Narratives and Readings.

Education/Academic qualification

African Studies, PhD, Beautiful Mozambique: Haptics of Belonging in the Life Narratives of Female War Veterans, University of Helsinki

1 Aug 201114 Mar 2017

Award Date: 14 Mar 2017

External positions

Research Affiliate, University of Dar es Salaam

20242027

Research Affiliate, University of Malawi

20242027

Research Affiliate, Ghent Univ, Ghent, Belgium

1 Feb 202131 Dec 2022

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Ghent University

1 Feb 201931 Jan 2021

Fields of Science

  • 615 History and Archaeology
  • gender history in Africa
  • oral history
  • oral traditions
  • life history
  • sensory aesthetics
  • war and peace
  • past in the present
  • gendered histories of power
  • Mozambican Liberation Struggle
  • semantic histories
  • southeastern Africa
  • temporality and gender
  • non-linear approaches
  • the longue durée
  • Mozambique
  • Malawi
  • Tanzania
  • 6160 Other humanities
  • African Cultural Studies
  • Gender Studies

International and National Collaboration

Publications and projects within past five years.