Description of research and teaching

I am currently working as Professor of Gender Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (2008 - ). During 2011-2015 I acted as Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland, leading the academy professor project Philosophy and Politics in Feminist Theory. Previously I have worked for five years as professor of Gender Studies at the University of Jyväskylä where I also had a permanent position as a professor of Political Theory. 

For the past fifteen years I have been actively leading cross-generational research teams: I was a vice leader of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change(2006-2011), and presently I work together with early career scholars as the Politics of Philosophy and Gender(PPhiG) team within which we explore various topics of feminist thought, always with a political accent.

My areas of specialization include

* feminist theory and philosophy

* political thought

* history of concepts

I am a multidisciplinary scholar, originally trained in the areas of philosophy, history, and politics, with feminist and queer interests. I started as a scholar of Hegel and of political theory (Valtio ja vapaus [The State and Freedom/Liberty], 1989), and have since studied closely many other thinkers and texts, among them Jean-Francois Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida. In my early career I worked on the icon of Finnish 19^thcentury nationalist thought, Hegelian philosopher J.V. Snellman. Since that time I have been interested in the patterns of political thought and democratic theory. I have also studied the history of political concepts, such as the concept valtio(the State) in Finnish. 

In Finland I was among those with early interest in the 20^thcentury French philosophy (Derrida, Foucault), and keen on developing postmodern anti-foundational thought. I was internationally among the first to take serious interest in Judith Butler’s work; I published on this work in the early 1990s, and later also co-translated her Gender Troubleinto Finnish. 

My current research continues and develops the work conducted in my academy professor project Philosophy and Politics in Feminist Theory(2011-2015) concentrating on contemporary feminist theory. In my work I study the main figures of current feminist theory, such as Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, and Adriana Cavarero with an approach that I call ‘politics of philosophy’. I pay attention to the scholars’ attachments to different philosophical traditions, the ensuing conceptual conflicts, and how these conflicts are textually played out. I have also kept my long term interests in German Idealism and having earlier co-edited a volume Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought with Kimberly Hutchings (2010), I recently  edited the Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist thought with Susanne Lettow (2023).

I strongly value international contacts in my area of study. In the early 1990s I spent four years at the University of Santa Cruz California working on my The Postmodern and Political Agency (1996). I then worked for a year at the philosophy department at University of Greifswald, Germany in 1998-1999, visited Minnesota AFS in 2002, and spent two years 2007-2009 at the University of Manchester, CRESC. I also visited in 2012 for half a year University of Paris 8 Gender Studies. I am regularly invited to give presentations abroad, and I entertain close connections to many institutions, including Paris 8 (Gender Studies), University of London Birkbeck College (BIGS), and to Kingston University (CREPH). 

I have concluded supervision of 17 doctoral students in multiple different disciplines and universities, and I currently advice five doctoral students in Helsinki. I was the director of the national Doctoral Programme of Gender Studies (2012-2015), and I am the founding director of the Doctoral programme in Gender, Culture and Society (SKY) within the University of Helsinki. (2014 - ). Directing and further developing SKY is currently among my main interests, and in conjunction with SKY I have also, now already for over ten years run a regular Advanced Research seminar of high level visiting speakers, the Christina Research Seminar.  

I am the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Redescriptions – Political Thought, Conceptual Change and Feminist Theory, which started in Finland in the 1990s, steadily gained in international weight, and moved through a number of international publishes. In 2019 Redescriptions made a bold move to become a completely open access journal with the new publisher, Helsinki University Press (HUP).  With its unique profile this journal is close to my heart and I currently devote time to develop it further as such.   

I was a board member of International Association of Women in Philosophy (IAPh) in 2010-2018, and the president of the Finnish Gender Studies Association (SUNS) in 2010-2017. I am also a member of Finnish Academy of Science and Letters since 2011, and Officier dans L’Ordre des Palmes Academiques since 2016.