PhD students
HISTORY
Jelizaveta Hristokina is a PhD student in History. In her undergraduate thesis, she examined the "russification policy" of Governor Sergei Shakhovskoi in the framework of Slavophilism during the reign of Alexander III. In her master's thesis, she explored the ethnographic stereotypes of Estonians created by Baltic Germans in the late 18th century within the discourse of scientific Russian nationalism in the late 19th century. For her doctoral dissertation, she focuses on the image of Estonian peasants within the Russian Empire in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, relying on ethnographic sources. The objective of her research lies in analyzing the interplay between scientific, national, and imperial perceptions.
Kristo Siig is a PhD student in History. He completed his MA studies in Archaeology at the University of Helsinki. In his doctoral research Kristo studies the hillforts and settlement structure of Northern Estonia during the Late Iron Age. His aim is to discuss the functions of hillforts and the relationship to their surroundings, i.e. were hillforts simply defensive structures or also centres of power or marketplaces, what were the hinterlands of hillforts like and what all of this says about the Iron Age society. In order to answer these questions, he mainly uses different quantitative spatial methods.
James Montgomery Baxenfield is a PhD student in History. He completed his MA in Comparative History of Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe at Central European University, Budapest. James researches Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian history, with a specific focus on the concept of Latvian-Lithuanian federation. His doctoral research traces the phenomenon of Latvian-Lithuanian federation from the period of national awakening until the final decades of the twentieth century.
Karl Peeter Valk is a PhD student in History both at Tallinn University and at Sorbonne University, where he received his MA degree in Medieval History. His research focuses on the writings of Philippe de Mézières, a fourteenth-century French writer who spent his life serving and advising a number of potentates all over Europe and the Middle East. Although diverse in nature, his extant literary works are all concerned with the spiritual and political reform of Christendom, culminating in a general crusade and the establishment of an ideal Christian society where the borders between the earthly and the heavenly cities become blurred. Using the methods of intellectual and cultural history, Karl Peeter studies Mézières’ ideas and sources as well as the rhetorical strategies by which he sought to transform the world around him.
Andre Kruusmaa is a PhD student in History. He completed his MA in History at Tartu University, while he has also spent some time doing research at UNCG and Vilnius University. His research largely focuses on pro-slavery and pro-serfdom ideas and movements during the era of abolition and emancipation in the context of the Southern states, British Empire and the Russian Baltic provinces.
Karl Hein is a PhD student in History. He completed his MA studies in Theology and Religious Education at Tartu University. He has joined the research project "Estonian Environmentalism in the 20th century: ideology, discources, practices" and is writig his PhD thesis about the animal rights movement in Estonia during the Interwar period (1918-1940).
Piia Sandrak is a PhD student in History. She has studied history at Tallinn University and works at the Foundation Osiliana which researches the history of Saaremaa, the biggest island of Estonia. In her bachelor thesis, she studied the activity of Gotland Cistercians in Kolga that is located in North-Estonia, and translated the first royal letters of confirmation concerning their estates in there into Estonian. The master thesis dealt with the socio-political landscape of 13th-century Saaremaa, with a focus on the parish of Valjala-Karja, and introduced, among other things, Guta Lag (the law of Gotland), as a possible source for making sense of the 13th-century treaties regarding Saaremaa and its local inhabitants. In her doctoral thesis, she focuses on 13th-century Saaremaa in the wider context of the Baltic Sea, combining written sources with archaeological finds and landscape analysis.
STUDIES OF CULTURES
Karel Jõeleht is a Junior Researcher/PhD Student in Chinese studies at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University, focusing his research on 20th-century Chinese philosophy and foreign politics. He earned a Master’s degree in the Asian Societies program at Tallinn University, with his MA thesis titled “China’s Peripheral Diplomacy Under Xi Jinping: A Neorealist Analysis.” In addition to his work in Chinese studies, Karel also has a keen interest in topics related to the Korean Peninsula.
Iverson Ng is an early career researcher at Tallinn University’s School of Humanities, focusing on the judicial border between Hong Kong and mainland China following the implementation of the 2020 Hong Kong National Security Law. Before his research on Hong Kong, he was interested in the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, Russian foreign policy and the construction of Ukrainian identity. He holds a Master’s degree in EU-Russia studies from Tartu University and a bachelor’s degree in international journalism from Hong Kong Baptist University. His previous publications were related to EU elite discourses on public health and Ukrainian journalists’ perceptions of the EU.
Iveta Aare is a PhD student in Studies of Culture (English Literature and Culture). She completed her MA studies in Literature, Visual Culture and Film Studies in Tallinn University. Her current research focuses on such concepts as the Body without Organs and Becoming-Animal in Western and Global South/Postcolonial Anglophone cinema. The aim of her research is to demonstrate the scarcity of exclusively humane self-expression and humans’ tendency of reunification with their animal-self. The comparison of Western and Postcolonial cinema is chosen in order to demonstrate that a wider range of emotional expression available in the state of the Body without Organs and Becoming-Animal might be beneficial for both coping with personal tragedy and the deeply rooted generational pain.
Jekaterina Maadla holds an MA in Conference Interpreting (Estonian, Russian and English), an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Tallinn University and is currently a PhD student in Studies of Cultures. Katerina´s main research focuses on interpreter-mediated communication in crisis settings. She has been working as an interpreter for various Estonian public and private institutions for more than ten years and has been training Conference and Community Interpreters at Tallinn University. In 2022 she held a researcher´s position in an international project ‘Improving communication with migrants for crisis preparedness: lessons learned from COVID-19’, funded by the Council of the Baltic Sea States. Her professional experience as a public service interpreter and strong ties with ethnolinguistic minorities in Estonia offer her an unique comparative perspective and a practical insight into her research interests connected to the PhD and any project engaging multilingual communication.
Madli Mihkelson is a PhD student in Studies of Cultures. She completed her MA studies in Cultural Theory at Tallinn University. Her main research interest is Soviet Estonian graphic design with a specific focus on poster art in the 1980s as a hybrid cultural phenomenon. She investigates the repositioning of poster art within the art field and analyses the expression of this process in the visual means of the posters and their communicability by using the theoretical instruments of semiotics and visual rhetoric. The aim of her research is not only to find new information on the phenomenon itself, but also on the potential methods of analysing the poster as a multimodal medium and the applicability of these methods.
Denis Kuzmin is a PhD student in the anthropological branch of Studies of Cultures. He gained his MA grade at Tallinn University in the area of Russian as a Foreign Language, and participating in prof. Irina Belobrovtseva’s grant he got his experience as a researcher and wrote his thesis on cultural studies topic. In his PhD thesis he studies Estonian North Caucasian diaspora and its people’s ethnicity and level of their transnationalism.
His research focuses on migration, cultural trauma, ethnicity, transnationalism, oral history and paradigm “own-other-strange-enemy”. Denis Kuzmin undertakes his study in the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies.
Louise Sträuli is a PhD student in Studies of Cultures. After graduating from the Erasmus Mundus Master in ‘Global Markets, Local Creativities’, Louise joined the research Project ‘Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting’ (PUTSPACE), within which her doctoral research is embedded. Beyond the question of what distinguishes public transport as public, Louise aims to uncover the tensions between everyday mobility experiences and planning-related mobility narratives. In particular, she examines the development of policies regarding safety and fares, the experience of ticket controls and practices of fare evasion, and the influence of digital media on the use of public transport. To this end, she combines analyses of policies and online communities with qualitative interviews and (mobile) ethnographic methods.
Main Uddin is a doctoral student in Anthropology. He completed his Bachelor and Masters in Anthropology from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh and M.Phil. in Anthropology from Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. His academic interest focuses on mobility and migration, refugee, transnationalism, globalization, Diaspora, climate change, gender issue and South Asia as region. His doctoral study explores the continuity and changes in the discourse and practices of traditional gender roles of men and women in a patriarchal Muslim society in rural Bangladesh following international migration of men leaving their women counterparts in the place of origin. The study is an ethnographic account which investigates whether the changes are temporal for migration period and what happens to the practices when the husbands permanently return. The study contextualizes structure and agency of practice theory to understand how patriarchal structure influences individuals and how individuals play role to transform the structure in exchange through their mobility, activity and resistance.
Alina Poklad is a PhD student in Studies of Culture. She completed an MA at Tallinn Technical University in IT and business management before earning an MA at Tallinn University in Slavic Languages and Cultures. Her PhD research topic is disability studies. She focuses on the image of disabled people in Russian culture. In her work, she investigates why Russian society still perceives people with disabilities as "other" and why the representation of these people in Russian culture is still stigmatized, despite changing attitudes in other European countries. Alina Poklad uses theories and frameworks of various authors in the disability studies field to analyze these questions.
Eva-Liisa Linder is a PhD student in Studies of Cultures. She holds a MA in theatre studies from Tartu University and works as a theatre researcher and lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. Her research focuses on contemporary Estonian theatre as a creator of the public sphere and a participant in ethical and national discussions. The comparative analysis into theatre’s role in Estonia and other European countries reveals different types of the theatrical public sphere, which have contributed to the development of society and functioned as soft power. The interdisciplinary research is based on performance analysis and critical theory of the Frankfurt school, combining social and theatre studies.
Hirohisa Koike is a PhD student in Studies of Cultures. He completed his MA studies in Imaging Arts and Sciences at Musashino Art University in Japan, then worked as an artist-researcher at L’école des beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole in France. His primary research examines the role of delay and desire in photography, based on the conceptual legacy of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. He works as a photographer and lectures the history and theory of photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Bernadette Ščasná completed her MA in Literature, Visual Culture and Film Studies at Tallinn University. Now she is a PhD student in Studies of Culture, specifically in the project ″Translating Memories″. In this project, the members are focused on the aesthetic media of memory in the context of memory cultures and politics while aiming to offer a comparative and transnational view on the entangled histories and memories of Central and Eastern Europe in relation to the totalitarian regimes. The main aim of her research is to analyze the relationship between fact and fiction in different representations of the socialist regime and the Holocaust. The main subjects of her research are books and films originating in Slovakia and the Czech republic that are dealing with these crucial historical events.
Meos Holger Kiik is a PhD student in the curriculum “Studies of Culture” conducting research in contemporary political philosophy. In 2017 he defended his MA thesis in philosophy in Tallinn University on „The Possibility of Justification of Democracy”. Now he is working on the problems of appealing to knowledge in the justifications of democracy and the concept of “reasonableness” in democratic theory with the working title “The role of „reasonability” and epistemic success in the conceptions and justification of deliberative democracy, and related problems.”
Authors such as John Rawls, Cristina Lafont, David Estlund, Snježana Prijić-Samaržija, Christian F. Rostbøll and others often are relevant to his work.
He is also working at TTK University of Applied Sciences as a lecturer of critical thinking and philosophy.
Kalev Aasmäe is a PhD student in Studies of Cultures, focusing on Anthropology. He has completed a MA degree in Ethnology at the University of Tartu and also holds an MSc degree from the University of Copenhagen in Anthropology. In his PhD thesis he studies the everyday life of squatters in London after the ban of residential squatting, focusing on the topics of space, time, and mobility. Kalev is also a Junior Researcher/Lecturer at Stockholm School of Economics Riga/BICEPS, where he is working on a project on the „brain drain – brain gain“ process in the Baltics by studying human capital gain and loss resulting from mobility.
Aynur Rahmanova is a PhD student in Studies of Cultures. She completed her MA studies in semiotics at the University of Tartu with an analysis of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose as a deconstruction and critique of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of carnival. Her doctoral thesis continues her work on carnival as a double-faced and binary structure which disguises authoritarian discourses as modes of social liberation. Rahmanova's research interests concern peripheral discourses in culture, namely Soviet political jokes and monsters in illuminated manuscripts.
Aleksandra Ianchenko is a doctoral candidate in Studies of Culture. She studied Fine Arts at Irkutsk Technical University, Russia and then obtained her second MA degree in Art Management at Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow and at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her current research is embedded within the project “Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting (PUTSPACE)”. As an artist, Aleksandra uses a range of creative mediums with the aim to understand atmospheres on urban public transport and the ways in which they can be changed through performative public art practice.
Yan Asadchy is a Ph.D. student in Studies of Cultures and Junior Researcher at CUDAN Open Lab. After graduating from the Human-Computer Interaction program at Tallinn University, Yan pursued his interest in understanding how people behave online. His work focuses on digital cultures, online communication, and self-representation in Online Dating. Yan uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods along with digital-only methods to understand how people interact across social media platforms and how platform affordances shape the way users represent themselves.
Mark Mets is a PhD student in Studies of Cultures. He completed his MA studies in Semiotics at the University of Tartu. In his doctoral research Mark studies the representations of other cultures and cultural transmission of those representations by analysing big data. His aim is to describe the different dynamics by which these representations of other cultures
change in order to better understand cultural transmission and cultural evolution.
Furthermore, this research evaluates to what extent specific methods of modelling cultural data contribute to a better understanding of cultural transmission and evolution in general. He achieves this by analysing specific datasets that demonstrate how representations of other cultures have changed throughout time and by looking for similarities and differences in patterns of change within and between these datasets. Mark is part of the Cultural Data Analytics (CUDAN) project.
Niklas Söderman is a PhD Student in Studies of Cultures. He completed his MA studies in East Asian Studies and MSSc studies in Political Science at the University of Helsinki. In his doctoral research at Tallinn University, Niklas studies Japanese and comparative philosophy, specialising in the philosophy of the Kyoto School and its intercultural approach to philosophy. His dissertation explores the idea of subjectivity in the philosophy of the Kyoto School, its relationship to the intellectual history of their period and its underpinnings in Buddhist philosophy. The research is focused particularly on the works of the School’s founder Nishida Kitaro and his student Nishitani Keiji, on how their explorations of subjectivity developed in dialogue with the political aesthetics of the early 20th century Japan, and how their philosophical views have influenced the understanding of what a Japanese subjectivity means, even in contemporary discourse.
Sandra Peets is a PhD student in Studies of Cultures. She has received a MA in Asian societies and politics, with an emphasis on Iran studies, from Tallinn Univesity. Sandra researches the speeches of Ayatollah Khomeini. The aim of her research is to find and analyse the main foreign policy narratives applied by Khomeini. Also, Sandra teaches courses about Middle–East at the Institute of Humanities. From January 2021 she works as a junior researcher at the TLU Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies.
Dana Karjatse-Davidjants is a PhD Student (Studies of Cultures) focusing on the Middle East. Her research concentrates on the identity construction of ISIS, analysing the key speeches by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the official spokespersons. More broadly, she is interested in the relationship between identity (identity politics), ideology, and political violence. Previously, she has worked as a Country of Origin Information (COI) Researcher specialising on the Middle East (mostly Syria and Iraq), as an Asylum Case Officer (including in the refugee camps in Greece and Italy), and as a Copy Editor in the Art Museum of Estonia. She holds an MA and BA degree in Asian Studies (Middle Eastern Studies), and BA in Estonian Philology.
Rita Niineste is a PhD student of philosophy at the University of Tallinn. She has BA degrees in English philology (Tartu University) and philosophy (Tallinn University), and an MA in cultural theory and philosophy (Tallinn University). Her research focuses on feminist perspectives on sexual difference, as well as the philosophy of sexuality and sexual ethics. She is interested in the phenomenological analysis of empirical data yielded by experimental psychology and in prospects for science-based approaches to sexuality within the tradition of philosophy and beyond.
Hanna Maria Aunin is a PhD student in Studies of Culture. She completed her MA studies in Literature, Visual Culture and Film Studies in Tallinn University. Hanna’s current research is part of the project "Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena" and focuses on memory, film and the concept of gaze. She is interested in how the act of seeing and being seen is culturally, socially and historically determined. The aim of her research is to explore the functions and manifestations of the gaze in Baltic films about the Soviet past and World War II, and how the gaze affects the spectators’ cinematic experience, the ways of seeing and remembering.
Johannes Bent received his MA from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He is interested in the theory and philosophy of history, intellectual history and Eastern European history. In his PhD project he researches the ties of Ernst Troeltsch’s (1865-1923) late oeuvre to Eastern Europe during the interwar period.
Kevin Rändi is a doctoral student in Studies of Cultures programme who specializes in philosophy. He earned his MA degree in Culture Theory and Philosophy at Tallinn University. He has been a visiting student at Warsaw University (Poland) and Palacký University in Olomouc (Czech Republic). His doctoral thesis is based on philosophical and theoretical discourses that attempt to understand our current human condition from future-oriented perspective. He emphasizes the importance of Don Ihde’s contribution to post-phenomenology and post-hermeneutics together with the advancements in the field brought by Peter-Paul Verbeek. In light of this relational account, Kevin sees further possibilities for examining other phenomenological horizons and the plurality of human condition nearing our technological future. His earlier work focused on the topic of possibility, consciousness, and speculative reason in the works of Alfred North Whitehead.
Since 2020 he teaches “Critical Thinking” in Helsinki and assists the same course in Tallinn. He has also been the supervisor for LIFE project on Futures Literacy in Tallinn University.
Piret Pärgma obtained her master’s degree in Translation at Tallinn University. In translation studies, her research interests focus on translator studies, translators' (in)visibility and translators' position in cultural field. In her doctoral dissertation, Piret studies literary translations of English language works into Estonian in three time periods and places them into the cultural context of the era, using the central concepts of Bourdieu's field theory and methods of writing translation history by Lieven D’hulst and Anthony Pym.
LINGUISTICS
Loviisa Mänd is a PhD student and junior research fellow in Linguistics. She has a BA degree in Estonian Philology and an MA degree in Linguistics and Language Editing, both from Tallinn University. Loviisa’s research focuses on the semantical and word formational aspects of Estonian affective vocabulary, or more precisely, the word formational means of expressing affect, emotions and evaluation, the connections between the meanings of words and their linguistic forms, and also the generational differences in affective word formation.
Ilenia Del Popolo Marchitto is a PhD student and Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics (Russian Studies and Communication). After completing her MA in Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” with a thesis in Didactics of Russian as a foreign language, she worked as assistant teacher of Russian language at TLU School of Humanities. Her doctoral research focuses on linguistic choices and politeness strategies in everyday communication in Russian as a native and foreign language. Her research interests include: Russian language and linguistics, corpus-based approach to language, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and second language acquisition.
Natalia Siereda is a PhD student in Linguistics. She holds a MA in Arabic Philology (Jagiellonian University) and a BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies (University of Warsaw). In her doctoral research she analyses the phenomenon of code-switching between Arabic and English in vlogs. Her academic interests include contact linguistics, Arabic dialectology, di-/multiglossia in bi-/multilingual societies and foreign language teaching methods.
Mai Raet works as a Junior Research Fellow at Tallinn University School of Humanities. She holds a BA in Literature and Cultural Studies as well as a MA in Translation Studies. Her PhD research concentrates on Estonian COVID-19-related discourse and crisis communication. Her academic interests include cognitive lexicography, relations between language and culture, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities.
Merle Oguz is a PhD student in linguistics whose research focuses on figurative language and its universality and variability across different languages and cultures, as well as the translation process of such language. Specifically, she is currently comparing the colour idioms in Estonian, Turkish, and Swedish. Merle has a master's degree in translation studies and has worked as a translator of non-literary texts.
Piret Baird is a PhD student in linguistics. She has a MA degree from the University of Tartu in comparative politics and a MA degree from Brigham Young University in TESOL. Her research interests are early bilingualism/multilingualism and code-switching. Her PhD thesis is about early successive bilingualism.