Call for Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellows

Marek Tamm is a Professor of Cultural History at Tallinn University. He is also Head of the Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies and a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. His primary research fields are cultural history of medieval Europe, theory and methodology of history, digital history, and cultural memory studies. He has recently published, as editor, The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (with Peeter Torop, 2022), A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age (with Alessandro Arcangeli, 2020), Making Livonia: Actors and Networks in the Medieval Baltic Sea Region (with Anu Mänd, 2019), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (with Laurent Olivier, 2019) and Debating New Approaches to History (with Peter Burke, 2018). He has a rich experience in project leading, currently, he is the PL of the 5-year project “Digital Livonia: For a Digitally Enhanced Study of Medieval Livonia (c. 1200–1550)”, funded by the Estonian Research Council, and of the 3-year project "Sustainable, Usable and Visible Digital Cultural Heritage: Twinning for Excellence", funded by the European Commission. Full CV.

Liisi Keedus is a Professor of Political Philosophy. Her main research interests are history of modern political thought and comparative intellectual history, but also liberal and republican political theories, civil society and environmental issues in political philosophy, and philosophies of history. She also welcomes research projects on other themes in 20th century continental philosophy. Prof. Keedus is the project leader of „Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe“, funded by European Research Council. Full CV.

Karsten Brüggemann is a Professor of Estonian and General History. His research interests include the history of the Baltic states and Russia / Soviet Union, cultural history, transnational history, memory and history and history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He led the projects “A Transnational Setting for Estonian History: Transcultural Entanglements, International Organisations and Transborder Migrations” and “Adapting to modernity: The Estonian society`s response to political, social, economical and cultural challenges in times of transformation (16th–20th centuries)”. Currently he leads the project "The 'Soviet West' Revisited: Individual and Collective Agency in the Contact Zones of Everyday Life in the Estonian SSR". Full CV.

Ulrike Plath is a Professor of Environmental History and the Head of the Estonian Centre for Environmental History at Tallinn University. In her work, she has a focus on Baltic-German food, climate and animal history in the 17th-19th century. She has organized the ESEH 2019 in Tallinn and initiated the BALTEHUMS conference series. In addition, she curated several exhibitions; among those, the prize-winning exhibition “Art in the time of the Anthropocene” in the Estonian Art Museum (2023). She has led projects on Baltic food and climate history and is the project leader of the interdisciplinary project “Estonian environmentalism in the 20th century: discourses, practices, ideologies”. Her BA, MA and PhD students have been awarded with the highest prizes for student works in Estonia. Full CV

Tauri Tuvikene is a Professor of Urban Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His research covers urban and cultural geography, particularly on the intersection of urban cultures, mobilities, cities, and policies. His research interests include (re)conceptualisation of post-socialism and experiences and regulations of urban mobility ranging from automobility to walking. He has published on these topics in journals such as IJURR, City, Geoforum, Current Sociology, and others, and has co-edited books Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures (2019, Routledge) and If Cars Could Walk: Postsocialist Streets in Transformation (2023, Berghahn). He has led the HERA-funded project PUTSPACE "Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting" and is currently PI of the project “Capacities for Resilient and Inclusive Urban Public Transport Infrastructure and Built Environment”, funded by JPI Urban Europe. Full CV.

Hannes Palang is a Professor of Human Geography, the Head of the Centre for Landscape and Culture at Tallinn University and President of the Estonian Geographical Society. His research interests include interactions of landscape, culture and history. He has published over a hundred academic articles and edited 13 volumes and special issues and is the incoming Editor in Chief of Landscape Research. He has implemented several national and international research projects and is currently the Principal Investigator of the project “Landscape approach to rurbanity”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV.

Raili Nugin is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Landscape and Culture. She holds a PhD in sociology and is interested in how social relations are navigated and played out in space. Her interests include rural-urban relations, migration, (Ukrainian) refugees, and how memory and heritage are negotiated in different socio-spatial contexts. Her recent interest has been how the Ukrainian war has affected mobilities and migration (including migration escaping war mobilisation), rural-urban and cultural relations, how it creates new boundaries and borders and how these are contested by different social groups. She was the Estonian leader of the project "Crossing borders, building walls. Towards ethnography of Russian war mobilisation" and is currently involved in the Horizon project “Cross-Border Cultural and Creative Tourism in Rural and Remote Areas” (CROCUS). Full CV.

Karin Dean is a Senior Researcher in political geography. Her research revolves around borders — on how different actors construct, negotiate and cross physical, symbolic or virtual borders in their claiming of political space. Most of her research has focused on the political spatialities and b/ordering at borderlands across China, Myanmar and India. Karin Dean is the project leader of Eur-Asian Border Lab, an international consortium aiming to catalyses trans-regional conversations and synergies between the Euro-American and Asian border scholars. She has published in journals such as Political Geography; Eurasian Geography and Economics; Territory, Politics and Governance; Surveillance & Society; and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Borderlands Studies. Full CV.

Tarmo Pikner  is an Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and his academic background is in human geography. Pikner´s research interests include urban political ecologies, and how it forms relations between nature, culture and technology. The second strand of the research focuses on assemblages of significant environmental changes, heritage and Anthropocene appearances. He is currently the Principal Investigator of two research projects: “Baltic Sea2Land”, which studies sustainability and energy transitions in the context of coastal communities, and “Resilience through cultural services”, which focuses on roles of cultural practice in maintaining rural communities. Full CV.

Eneken Laanes is a Professor of Comparative Literature and the project leader of "Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena", funded by the European Research Council. Her research interests include transnational literature and memory, trauma studies, post-socialist memory cultures in Eastern Europe, multilingual literature autobiography and lifewriting, the historical novel, critical theory and cultural analysis. Her research is increasingly situated at the intersection of various artistic media such as literature, film and art. Full CV.

Julia Kuznetski is a Professor of English and Head of English Studies at Tallinn University. Her research interests include literary theory, film studies, literature by women, gender, identity and crisis studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postcolonial theory, body, transcorporeality, diasporic and migrant literature, and dystopia. She is the author of recognised publications in these areas, including a co-edited volume (with Silvia Pellicer-Ortín) titled Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Routledge, 2019), a special journal issue of Women: A Cultural Review “We Too”: Female Voices in the Transnational Era of Crises, Migration, Pandemic and Climate Change' (2023) and articles such as “Disempowerment and Bodily Agency in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and The Handmaid’s Tale TV Series” (The European Legacy 2021) and “Estonian literature and Ecofeminism” (with Kadri Tüür, Routledge 2022) and is currently co-editing The Routledge Companion to Literature and Crisis (2024). Kuznetski is a founding member of the gender studies research group at Tallinn University. Full CV.

Daniele Monticelli is a Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies. His research is characterised by a wide and interdisciplinary range of interests which include translation studies and, particularly, translation history, philosophy of language, literary semiotics, Italian studies and contemporary critical theory. He has authored over 60 academic articles and has edited 6 collections of papers in five different languages. He is the Principal Investigator of the project “Translation in History, Estonia 1850-2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV

Igor Pilshchikov is a Research Professor of Semiotics of Culture and Russian Literature at Tallinn University and Professor & Chair of the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages & Cultures. His research interests include cultural semiotics, comparative literature, literary theory, verse theory, digital humanities and the history of Russian literature. He has authored three books and over two hundred scholarly articles (published in eleven languages worldwide) and edited over twenty volumes and special issues. He currently leads the project “Around the World and Back Again: A Global Typology of the Reception of Estonian Semiotics”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV.

Daniele Monticelli is a Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies. His research is characterised by a wide and interdisciplinary range of interests which include translation studies and, particularly, translation history, philosophy of language, literary semiotics, Italian studies and contemporary critical theory. He has authored over 60 academic articles and has edited 6 collections of papers in five different languages. He is the Principal Investigator of the project “Translation in History, Estonia 1850-2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices”, funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV.

Carlo Cubero is an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology whose research is divided into two strands. The first involves the development of audiovisual methods for anthropological research, including directing documentaries, creating sound-works, and curating ethnographic film and sound programmes. The second strand focuses on the complexities of Caribbean island life, particularly the concept of "transinsularism" as a means of productively engaging with the contradictions of Caribbean island identities. Full CV.

Reili Argus is a Professor of Estonian Language. Her research interests include psycholinguistics and first language acquisition, word formation in Estonian, morphology, and language editing. She has conducted cross-linguistic research in the acquisition of diminutives, evidentiality and deontic modality. The main focus of her research has been on the acquisition of Estonian morphology, as well as on the acquisition of lexico-semantic and pragmatic categories. She works also on topics connected with language planning and practical use of language and has written a chapter on the Estonian language in the book Uralic Languages (2023). She has been involved in projects supporting language development, e.g. the creation of the FREPY set of language learning games, and the collection of child language corpora. Full CV.

Lisa Indraccolo is an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies. She earned her PhD (2010) from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a thesis on the early Chinese “sophistic” persuader Gongsun Long. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, and actively participated in the interdisciplinary research cluster University Research Priority Programme “Asia and Europe”. Her main research interests include early Chinese thought, with a focus on so-called “Masters texts” (zishu) and Warring States philosophical literature; Classical Chinese rhetoric, paradoxes, and language jokes; structural and rhetorical patterns of early Chinese texts; conceptual and intellectual history of premodern China, also from a comparative perspective; and early cross-cultural encounters between China and Japan. She is currently Vice President of the European Association for Chinese Studies and an affiliated member of the Zurich Center for the Study of the Ancient World (ZAZH). Full CV.

The School of Humanities at Tallinn University (TÜHI) received an overwhelming response to its call for expressions of interest for the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships launched in April 2023, with a total of 42 applications from scholars based in 20 countries across Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. The diverse range of academic fields represented in the applications includes Anthropology, Human Geography, Literature, Translation Studies, History, Urban Studies, Linguistics, and Chinese Studies.

Out of the pool of applicants, TÜHI selected 11 candidates who attended a 5-day onsite grant writing camp in July and collaborated closely with supervisors, trainers, and research advisors in preparing the application until September.

The results of the call in February 2024 confirmed the success of this project: seven candidates applied to MSCA with TÜHI as a host institution. Out of those seven two were funded through an MSCA fellowship and one through an ERA fellowship (above 94.4% score); two more obtained a score above 83%, passing the qualification threshold, and will be applying to get support for their project through ETAG.