Riikka Rossi

Riikka Rossi is 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. She is currently leading a three-year research project on narratives of the North and emotions Arctic Hysteria. Strange Northern Emotions (2020–2022) funded by the Kone foundation.

 

Photo: Veikko Somerpuro / Arctic Hysteria