I am studying novels by female authors born in the GDR in the 1970es (e.g., Antje Rávic Strubel) and explore how space and the traces of GDR are used in their novels.
The 2007 publication of Ruth Maier’s Diary. A Jewish refugee in Norway marked a turning point in the reception of her writings. Previously on the margins of Norwegian memory culture, her life story became recognized as a vital testimony to the Holocaust and has since taken a central place in narratives of Norway’s occupation years.
For the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian exile communities that emerged in the aftermath of World War II and the occupation of their respective homelands, the arts became a way to both perpetuate their identity in the free world and to explore the predicaments wrought by the condition of exile. Within the diasporas’ literary scenes, the works that touched upon the exilic experience varied from attempts to recapture and preserve lost homelands to contemplations on trauma and displacement.
Informal caregivers often experience expectancy violations when caring for loved ones. The experience of becoming an informal caregiver may for example challenge their expectations of themselves as caregivers and expectations regarding their own future. This thesis aims to investigate these schema violations as prominent themes in contemporary Scandinavian caregiving fiction.
The process of de-Stalinization made it finally possible for Soviet culture to start to free itself from a heavily censored and ideologically contained creative production, even if only partially. Inside this complex literary surrounding, a new group of poets emerged: Evgeny Evtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky were extremely young and at the very beginning of their careers, and therefore extremely receptive to all the changes and new possibilities of this decade.
In my PhD thesis, I research the post-Holocaust restitution of homes and businesses in Norway, focusing on the greater human significance of property and return. Through this lens, I examine the larger topics of Jewish Norwegians’ rebuilding of their post-Holocaust lives and the post-war Norwegian government’s response to the genocide.
My PhD project is focused on the memory of German Königsberg in today’s Kaliningrad – the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea. The main aim of this research is to explore how the memory of Königsberg is represented and interpreted by Kaliningraders, who are mostly ethnic Russians.
Using Germany as a case study, I examine public attitudes towards competing narratives about democracy within the German political discourse, alongside externally promoted counter-narratives from the Russian state.
In the Finnish special language of music, specifically ‘Finnish’ linguistic characteristics and elements are mixed and/or interfere with ‘translated’ features and terminology (prominently of German origin). The resulting special language with its subdivisions (minilects) is not merely a technical language or LSP, but it reflects the cultural narratives related to the meaning of (classical) music as a core element of the Finnish national self-image.
