Riikka Rossi

Beginning in 2024 Riikka Rossi has been a senior researcher at the Under and Tuglas Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, as participating researcher under the aegis of the research project “Emergence of a Civilised Nation: Decadence and Transitionality in 1905‒1940” (PRG1667). She is also a professor of Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Helsinki.

Her research centres on historical period-styles of Finnish literature, and more recently on literature and emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has published extensively on history and theory of literary naturalism, realism, and primitivism, and studied the literature of Decadence in relation to naturalism and early modernism. Her studies on emotions focus on negative and ambivalent emotions in literature, e.g., on the poetics of disgust, melancholia, nostalgia, ecstasy, anxiety, and difficult empathy.

Photo: Veikko Somerpuro / Arctic Hysteria