Meet the new PhD-members of the project – Ian T. Gwin and Mikko Välimäki

We are glad to announce that in September our project was joined by two new members, PhD-students Ian T. Gwin from the University of Washington and Mikko Välimäki from the University of Helsinki.

Ian T. Gwin‘s areas of interest are early modernism, decadence, deconstruction and queer theory. He is currently writing his thesis at the University of Washington. His MA-thesis was inspired by the Estonian decadent writer Jaan Oks. His PhD-dissertation describes decadence, nationalism and the fairy tale in literature around the Baltic Sea. His approach combines various critical methods from the study of the literary fairy tale (psychoanalytic, formalist) with folklore studies and the oral tale. He covers Estonian (Kreutzwald, Friedebert Tuglas), Finnish (Anni Swann, Joel Lehtonen), Latvian (Rainis, Karlīs Skalbe), Lithuanian (Oscar Milosz, Julius Kaupas) and other authorships.

Mikko Välimäki researches perceptions of societal decline, politics and nationalism, common morals, gender and sexuality, and race in visual arts from the late 19th century to the early 1900s. He deals with questions of social and cultural history in a variety of materials of visual culture, especially from Finland and its surrounding region. He is currently working on his PhD at the University of Helsinki, which examines the role of visual arts in the moulding of national identity of Finland in the few decades preceding its independence in 1917.