Building the Nation, Lighting the Torch: Excursions into the Writings of the Common People in Nineteenth-Century Finland

Anna Kuismin works as a senior fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2010–13) and holds an adjunct professorship of Finnish and comparative literature at the University of Helsinki. She previously worked at the Finnish Literature Society as the director of the Literary Archives (2001–9) and as an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Helsinki (1992–97). Among other things, she has been a visiting fellow at the Biographical Research Center at the University of Hawai'i (1997–98) and at Columbia University (1998–99), taught at the University of Tampere (1986–91), and edited an English-language literary quarterly, Books from Finland (1980–83). Originally interested in literary theory and modernist and post-modernist Finnish literature, her focus has shifted towards life writing and unpublished texts, as well as cultural and micro history. In 2001, she founded a multidisciplinary research network, “The Processes and Practices of Literacy in 19th-Century Finland,” which has many international contacts. At present, she coordinates a Nordic research project, “Reading and Writing From Below: Toward a New Social History of Literacy in the Nordic Sphere During the Long Nineteenth-Century,” financed by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (2011–14). She is also the principal investigator for “Exploring Social Boundaries From Below: Class, Ideology and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century Finland,” a research project financed by the Academy of Finland (2011–14). Kuismin's recent publications include a monograph on a diary kept by a young Finnish country seamstress in the 1890s, an anthology of autobiographies of nineteenth-century self-taught ordinary people, and various articles on different types of life writing.