Past GOF/DANS Professors

Hanna Mattila, 2018-2020

Hanna Mattila is an associate professor at Aalborg University, Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology. Dr. Mattila has been Senior University Lecturer at Aalto University, Finland, and a visiting scholar at the University of Sheffield (2013) and San Diego State University (2014). Dr. Mattila has extensive experience in planning practice. She has worked as the head of education (continuous professional development programs etc.) at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology, and as a regional planning and regional development officer at the Helsinki-Uusimaa regional council.

Dr. Mattila has a DSc degree in land use planning and transportation engineering, a LicSC degree in urban design and planning, and an MA degree in humanities. Her research interests include planning theory, social & political theory, planning law, design theory, and comparative planning studies. She currently leads the Academy of Finland-funded research project "Transforming Anatomies of Democratic Planning: Combining Planning-Theoretical and Legal Perspectives on Flexible Regulation in Finnish Land-Use Law" (TRANAPLAN), which is a consortium project with the University of Eastern Finland Law School.

Mari Pajala, 2015-2017

Mari Pajala’s research has focused on television as a cultural form, particularly in the context of Finnish media history. Her doctoral research discussed how an annual television event, the Eurovision Song Contest, has participated in constructing nationality in Finland since the early 1960s.

In her other work, she has studied the formation of cultural memory in contemporary television culture and analyzed representations of class and gender in popular media. Her ongoing research looks at the relations between Finnish television and socialist television cultures from the 1960–1980s. Pajala is a member of several research networks focusing on the study of European television and a member of the editorial board of the open-access journal View: European Journal of Television History and Culture.

Juhana Aunesluoma, 2015-2016

Juhana Aunesloma graduated from the University of Helsinki (Master in Social Sciences) in 1993 and received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1998 (Modern History Faculty & St. Antony's College). From 1998-2001 he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Nokia Corporation, the Finnish Association of Graduate Engineers, and the University of Helsinki. In 2001 he was appointed senior lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Helsinki. In 2010 he was appointed director (research director) of the Network for European Studies, multidisciplinary research, and teaching unit at the University of Helsinki devoted to the study of Europe in all its historical and contemporary diversity.

His work as a historian and European studies scholar is located at the intersection of European political and economic history in the 20th and 21st centuries and in the present and recent past.

Matti Jutila, 2012-2015

Dr. Jutila’s main unifying theme of his research has been nationalism; how it affects contemporary world politics and the construction of political communities. His doctoral research investigated how transnational governance of the rights of national minorities has challenged nationalism externally by circumscribing the sovereignty of nation-states, and internally by challenging the idea of national homogeneity as the foundation of political communities. He has also analyzed the securitization and desecuritization of national majority-minority relations, focusing especially on the role of historical narratives and myths in these processes. He serves as the editor-in-chief of Kosmopolis: Finnish Journal of Peace Research and World Politics (quarterly refereed journal publishing articles in Finnish and Swedish).

Erkki Huovinen, 2009-2013

Erkki Huovinen holds a Ph.D. and master's degree in musicology as well as a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Turku, a multi-disciplinary scientific university in Finland. He has held professor posts at the University of Turku and at the Åbo Akademi University, the Swedish-language university of Finland. After completing his doctoral dissertation in 2002 on a topic concerning music perception and cognition, his research has spanned the philosophy of music, ancient Greek music theory, the methodology of music analysis, as well as musical improvisation. Huovinen has been published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Music Analysis, Philosophy of Music Education Review, Music Theory Spectrum, Empirical Musicology Review, and in a number of Scandinavian journals.

Minna Rainio, 2000-2011

Minna Rainio is a photographer and media artist based in northern Finland. She studied photography at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design in England (BA) and audiovisual media culture at the University of Lapland (MA). At the moment she is working on her Ph.D. in the Elomedia research school (University of Art & Design in Helsinki). In her art, Rainio combines the use of photography or video with fact and fiction to deal with the social and political issues relating to people's personal histories, stories, and memories. Read More