Marja Jalava

BRIEF INFORMATIONMarja Jalava received a doctoral degree from the Department of History, University of Helsinki, Finland (2005), in the history of Finland and the Nordic countries. She has been awarded numerous fellowships by the University of Helsinki, the Academy of Finland, the Niilo Helander Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation, Svenska Kulturfonden, and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, to mention just a few. She also holds an award from the Department of History, University of Helsinki for the best dissertation (2006) and the Award of Historiallinen Aikakauskirja (Historical Journal of Finland) for excellence in writing (2003). She has participated in numerous international conferences with papers on the history of Finnish art, culture and education, gender studies, and concepts in Finnish philosophical discourse.

Since 2006, Dr Marja Jalava has been Adjunct Professor (Docent) in History at the University of Helsinki.

... My project examines academic historiography as a place where the conceptions of modernity, identity, and historicity have been shaped and debated. As a case study, I analyse the interpretation of the Lamprechtian paradigm of historical scholarship in the Finnish context, especially in the works of the historian Gunnar Suolahti (1876-1933). My project suggests that European ‘small-states', such as Finland, should not be considered mere second-class cases in relation to the so-called ‘leading nations', but we should, instead, acknowledge their creative eclecticism and their contribution to the construction of multiple modernities in Europe. On the professional level, respectively, I am interested in establishing networks of interaction between other fellows from the ‘non-core' Europe, whose voices are often quieted by the language barrier. By uniting our intellectual forces, we may reshape the ‘European canon' of political thought and create a more balanced picture of our common European cultural-political heritage ...

Marja Jalava