Arja Rosenholm is Professor of Russian Language and Culture at the University of Tampere. Her research interests include Russian literature and culture, gender studies, ecocriticism, Arctic studies and space. She has recently worked on the imagery of water in Russian literature and film in projects funded by the Academy of Finland. She is currently working on the visualization of the Russian North in the project “The Changing Environment of the North”.

Rosenholm has co-edited several volumes of essays, e.g. Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture (Routledge 2017),Topographies and Popular Culture (NLO, in Russian, 2015) and Russian Media and Changing Values (Routledge 2010). Relevant to the current project are the publications related to Russian women’s literature and culture. Rosenholm is the author of the monograph Gendering Awakening: Femininity and the Russian Woman Question in the 1860s (1999); she has also published numerous articles and edited volumes on the cultural history and literature of Russian women, e.g. “I live from mail delivery to delivery”: From the Correspondence of N. D. Khvoshchinskaia. Letters, introduction, and commentary (together with Hilde Hoogenboom, Verlag F.K. Göpfert. 2001); Models of Self: Russian Women’s Autobiographical Texts (together with Irina Savkina and Marianne Liljeström, Kikimora 2000) and Naisia Venäjän kulttuurihistoriassa (together with Suvi Salmenniemi and Marja Sorvari, Gaudeamus 2014).

Arja Rosenholm contributes to the project by studying the various roles women have had as actors and participants in Finnish and Russian literary and cultural organizations (including both formal and informal communities). She focuses on female writers’ genres, publishing, translating, and women’s roles in mediating cultural concepts in transnational activities. Rosenholm examines two periods characterized by socio-cultural transformations; the first between 1880 and 1910, and the decades of perestroika, the 1980s and 1990s. The research will focus on 1) the history of the literary dialogue and cooperation between Finnish and Russian women, 2) the ways and modes women’s texts travelled across national borders, and 3) the impact of the changes in cultural paradigms on women’s literary activities and the visibility of their literary creativity.