“Let Us Be Finns”: The Era before Finland's Independence

Helena Halmari is Professor in the English Department at Sam Houston State University, where she teaches linguistics and the history of the English language. Her research interests include language contact phenomena and discourse analysis, and she is the author of Government and Codeswitching: Explaining American Finnish (1997) and co-editor (with Tuija Virtanen) of Persuasion across Genres: A Linguistic Approach (2005). She has published a number of articles in journals like Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, and Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, as well as in edited volumes, and she is currently working on the bilingual correspondence of Jean and Aino Sibelius. Since 2011, Halmari has been the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Finnish Studies.

Scott Kaukonen (PhD, University of Missouri-Columbia) is an associate professor and director of the MFA Program in creative writing, editing, and publishing at Sam Houston State University. His debut collection of short stories, Ordination, received the Ohio State University Prize for Short Fiction and was published by OSU Press. A short story from that collection, “Punnett's Squares,” won the Nelson Algren Prize from the Chicago Tribune. His fiction has appeared in the Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, the Normal School, Barrelhouse, Louisiana Literature, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Kaukonen is currently completing two novels. With Helena Halmari, he translated from the Finnish Anja Snellman's novel, Pet Shop Girls (Ice Cold Crime, 2013). He is a former AWP/Prague Summer Fellow in Fiction and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose.

Hanna Snellman is Vice Rector and Professor of European Ethnology at the University of Helsinki, where she has also served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. In 2007, she served as Finnish Chair at Lakehead University, Canada. Snellman's research since the 1990s has focused on the ethnography of mobility, especially Finnish lumberjacks and Finnish immigrants to Sweden and North America, and the history of European Ethnology. In addition to several articles and book chapters (e.g., “Cookbooks for Upstairs: Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Perspective” in Hard Work Conquers All: Building the Finnish Community in Canada, University of British Columbia Press, 2018, “Everyday Language Policies: Embodiment of Language-Related Experiences of Finnish Women in Sweden” in Multilingual Matters, 2015), she has published four monographs, including Khants' Time (2000) and The Road Taken (2005), and co-edited nine books or special issues of journals. Currently she is working on transnational death, an edited volume coming out soon.

Hilary-Joy Virtanen is Assistant Professor of Finnish and Nordic Studies at Finlandia University in Hancock, Michigan, and Honorary Fellow at the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Trained in folklore and Nordic studies at the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University, Virtanen studies aspects of Finnish ethnic life in Finland and North America, including festival, folk music, traditional material culture, heritage language use, and folk dance. She is currently completing a book about a Finnish American festival created in 1999 that is inspired by Finland's Saint Henrik and related agricultural and bear calendar proverbs. In 2018, Virtanen was elected to the Finlandia Foundation Board of Trustees.