Call for Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellows

Marek Tamm is a Professor of Cultural History at Tallinn University, 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 The Fabric of Historical Time (with Zoltan B. Simon, 2023), 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)” (https://dl.tlu.ee/en), funded by the Estonian Research Council, and of the 3-year project "Sustainable, Usable and Visible Digital Cultural Heritage: Twinning for Excellence" (https://dight-net.tlu.ee/), funded by the European Commission. Full CV.

Liisi Keedus is a Professor of Political Philosophy. Her main research interests are the 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 the 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 is in charge of the project "The 'Soviet West' Revisited: Individual and Collective Agency in the Contact Zones of Everyday Life in the Estonian SSR". 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  Editor in Chief of Landscape Research. He has implemented several national and international research projects and is currently the Principal Investigator for two research projects, one studying cultural tourism in rural and remote areas and the other focusing on links between landscape and vocabulary in everyday language. 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—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 at the editorial board of the Journal of Borderlands Studies. Full CV.

Tarmo Pikner  is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Landscape and Culture and his academic background is in human geography. Pikner´s research interests include deep transitions, rural-urban relations and temporalities related to environmental crisis and de-growth. His research includes multiple forms of care, communities and anticipated futures reconfiguring human agencies in Anthropocene and relationships to planetary changes. The paradoxes and bordering between geopolitical security, everyday experiences and contested sustainabilities are studied. Currently, he is the principal investigator in two research projects: „Baltic Sea2Land” approaching tensions related to renewable energy transitions in coastal communities, and MARLENE project focusing on urban density and accessibility. Pikner is also involved as a senior research supervisor in ERA-Chair project SustainFutures. Full CV.

Eneken Laanes is a Professor of Comparative Literature and the project leader of "Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures (2025–2029, Estonian 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 ecocriticism, ecofeminism, new materialism,  transcorporeality, Blue humanities, diasporic and migrant literature, gender, identity and crisis studies. She is the author of a number of publications in these areas, including co-edited volumes The Routledge Companion to Literature and Crisis (2024); 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 is currently working on a monograph on the intersections of environment and memory in transnational women's writing. She is a researcher in the project "Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures", funded by the Estonian Research Council. Full CV.

Daniele Monticelli is aProfessor of Semiotics and Translation Studies. His research is characterized 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. At the moment he is also interested in the representation of AI in literature, movies and popular culture. 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, multilingualism, word formation in Estonian, morphology, and lexico-semantic categories. She has conducted cross-linguistic research in the acquisition of case, diminutives, evidentiality, epistemic 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.

Merilyn Meristo is an Associate professor of French at Tallinn University. She is also the head of the Foreign Language Teacher Master's Programme. Her research focuses on various aspects related to language learning (LL) and teaching, for example, motivation, self-efficacy, teacher identity, second language acquisition, LL strategies, LL beliefs and using CLIL. Her research is often framed by Self-Determination Theory. She is also interested in different support systems within educational contexts. She teaches research methods in Social Sciences and has also published methodology-related articles on using Phenomenological approach (IPA), narrative analysis, autoethnography as well as quantitative analyses (multi-variated statistical analyses). Additionally, she has done cross-historical analyses of foreign language teaching in the 20th century. She belongs to the board of the International Association for the Psychology of Language Learning and is actively engaged in the international community of Self-Determination Theory and Language Learning. Full CV.

Anna Verschik is a Distinguished Professor of General Linguistics and the Head of the doctoral curriculum in linguistics. Her scholarly interests include language contacts, multilingualism, sociolinguistics in the Baltic countries, contacts of Yiddish in the Baltic area and the sociolinguistic situation of post-Soviet countries from a comparative perspective. Recently, she has conducted research on sociolingusitcs of Ukrainian in Estonia and Finland. She has authored over a hundred articles on these topics. Full CV.

Lisa Indraccolo is an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Tallinn University. She earned her PhD (2010) from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a thesis on the early Chinese “sophistic” persuader Gongsun Long. She gained several years of research experience as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Zurich (2011-2020), where she 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 (especially Confucianism, "School of Names", Legalism); 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; premodern and modern Chinese literature; and early cross-cultural encounters between China, Japan, and Korea. She is currently Vice President of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS), and an affiliated member of the Zurich Center for the Study of the Ancient World (ZAZH). Full CV.

Over the past two years, the initiatives at TÜHI have shown impressive success:

• 2023 Call: Out of seven applications submitted with TÜHI as the host institution, three candidates received funding through MSCA fellowships. Additionally, two other researchers surpassed the qualification threshold and secured funding through the ETAG incoming postdoctoral grants scheme.
• 2024 Call: Nine candidates applied for MSCA with TÜHI as the host. Two of these researchers were successfully funded, one through an MSCA fellowship and another via an ERA fellowship. Three more candidates exceeded the qualification threshold and are currently seeking support through ETAG for their projects.