Description of research and teaching

Outi Hakola is a docent in Area and Cultural Studies, and she collaborates with Area and Cultural Studies and Film and Television Studies at the University of Helsinki. She works as an associate professor in communication studies at University of Eastern Finland. Her expertise includes cultural studies, film and television studies, audiovisual communication, death studies, North American studies, and humour studies. She is expert in mediatisation of death and dying, roles of political comedy, and uses of videos, including deepfake videos, in communication.

 

Her background is in film, television and literature studies. She has Master of Arts degrees in both Media Studies (2005) and Comparative Literature (2003) from the University of Turku, where she defended her dissertation, Rhetoric of Death and Generic Addressing of Viewers in American Living Dead Films, in 2011. After her PhD she worked at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies as a programme coordinator for Human Mortality project (2011-2013), at the Department of Radio-Television-Film (University of Texas at Austin, United States) as visiting researcher (2013-2014), and as a university lecturer in North American Studies (Area and Cultural Studies, University of Helsinki, 2014-2017). Most recently, she worked as a Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Area and Cultural Studies (University of Helsinki, 2017-2022). Her research project, Constructing Good Death, deals with documentary films on end-of-life issues. 

Education information

Doctor of Philosophy, Media Studies, University of Turku (2011)

Education information

Master of Arts, Media Studies, University of Turku (2005)

Education information

Master of Arts, Comparative Literature, University of Turku (2003).

Education information

Pedagogical Studies, University Pedagogy, University of Turku (2005).