Soile Ylivuori, PhD

Dr Soile Ylivuori (she/her) is a Core Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS). Her research interests include the history of the body, materiality and experiences, gender and race in the early modern British Empire, and intersections of cultural history and history of science, including the circulation of knowledge and power. Her current research investigates patients’ embodied experiences of medical electricity in the long eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. With the generous funding of the Horizon Europe ERC Starting Grant (2022-27), this project will be consolidated into a research group at the Uni. Helsinki Faculty of Humanities, with the title Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c.1740-1840 (ELBOW).

Dr Ylivuori has previously held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London and a Beinecke and Lewis Walpole Library Research Fellowship at Yale, as well as worked as a visiting researcher at UCLA and University of Cambridge.

Dr Ylivuori’s publications include the monograph Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England (Routledge, 2019) as well as peer-reviewed articles in journals including The Historical Journal and Cultural and Social History. She is currently in the process of finalising her second monograph on the intersections of whiteness and tropicality in the Georgian West Indies. Ylivuori has taught courses on early modern Britain, history of materiality and the body, and methodological approaches to gender and cultural history at Uni. Helsinki and QMUL and is currently a supervisor for Doctoral Programme in History and Cultural Heritage and Doctoral Programme in Gender, Culture, and Society. She welcomes potential postgraduate supervisees working on Britain and its Empire during 1600-1900, as well as projects examining interdisciplinary and intersectional histories of the body, material culture and experiences.