Ulla Savolainen

Ulla Savolainen (PhD, title of Docent) works as a university lecturer and a researcher at the University of Helsinki, Department of Cultures. She is a folklorist specializing in memory studies, oral history, and narrative research, with an interest in experiences and expressions related to (forced) migration, transnationality, and materiality.

Savolainen's current research project focuses on memories and experiences of Stalinist repression and displacement of Ingrian Finns. She has analyzed the mnemonic capacities of e.g. memoirs, fiction, museum exhibitions, and photographs and explored the political and aesthetic values and ideologies related to memory in culture more broadly. Previously,Savolainen has researched oral histories of internments of German and Hungarian citizens in Finland in 1944–1946 as well as the reception of compensation for past injustice. Savolainen's doctoral dissertation (2015) focused on the life writings of former Karelian child evacuees in Finland and the poetics of life writing and reminiscing. 

Savolainen is a member of the Executive Committee of the Memory Studies Association, a co-chair of the MSA Nordic and the former chair of the Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN). She has published her research in e.g.  Memory Studies, Narrative Inquiry, Journal of American Folklore, Oral History, Ethnologia Europaea, and Poetics Today.