Riikka Rossi’s research centers on historical period-styles of Finnish literature, and more recently on literature and emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has published extensively on history and theory of literary naturalism, realism and primitivism, and studied the literature of Decadence in relation to naturalism and early modernism. Her studies on emotions focus on negative and ambivalent emotions in literature, e.g. on the poetics of disgust, melancholia, nostalgia, ecstasy, anxiety and difficult empathy.

Riikka Rossi is currently leading a Kone foundation research project entitled Arctic Hysteria: Strange Northern Emotions, which explores the imaginations of the North and its affective aspects. She has led a three-year research project on realistic worldmaking funded by the University of Helsinki: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/realism-literature/  and participated  in several other projects as a member of the research group, including the Academy of Finland project Literature and Emotions http://blogs.helsinki.fi/literature-and-emotions/ and an interdisciplinary Kone foundation project on emotion sharing https://blogs.helsinki.fi/naapuridialogit/

Riikka Rossi has taught courses on Finnish literature, literary realism, naturalism and primitivism, literature and emotions, genre theory and text analysis and lectured in several universities in Finland and abroad including the University of Helsinki, Tampere University, the University of Vienna, the University of Cologne, the University of Greifswald, INALCO (Paris), the University of Caen, the University of Geneva, the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of Alberta, Edmonton.