Research output per year
Research output per year
Finland
Research activity per year
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.
African Studies, PhD, Beautiful Mozambique: Haptics of Belonging in the Life Narratives of Female War Veterans, University of Helsinki
1 Aug 2011 → 14 Mar 2017
Award Date: 14 Mar 2017
Research Affiliate, University of Dar es Salaam
2024 → 2027
Research Affiliate, University of Malawi
2024 → 2027
Research Affiliate, Ghent Univ, Ghent, Belgium
1 Feb 2021 → 31 Dec 2022
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Ghent University
1 Feb 2019 → 31 Jan 2021
Research output: Book/Report › Book › Scientific › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review
Suomen Akatemia Projektilaskutus
01/09/2023 → 31/08/2027
Project: Research Council of Finland: Academy Research Fellow
Jonna Katto (Speaker)
Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation
Jonna Katto (Speaker)
Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation
Jonna Katto (Visiting researcher)
Activity: Visiting an external institution types › Academic visit to other institution
Jonna Katto (Speaker)
Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation
Jonna Katto (Speaker)
Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation