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 and intellectual history. Her books include Crisis of German Historicism: The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss (2015/2019), and Time and Politics in Modern Political Thought (with Balazs Trencsenyi and Tommaso Giordani, upcoming). Prof. Keedus has led the group project „Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe“  (2018-2024), funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant. 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, economic 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.

Margaret Tali  is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Theory. Her research interests involve transnational histories of museums and material culture in the Baltic region, curating difficult histories in Eastern Europe and adaptation of postcolonial and decolonial theories in the context of Estonian and Baltic history and transcultural memory. She is the author of the monograph Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of the Special Issue “The Return of Suppressed Memories in Eastern Europe” in Memory Studies Journal (2022). She has co-curated the project Communicating Difficult Pasts (2019-2024) that brought together artistic researchers and humanities scholars and co-initiated the network project “Connecting Histories: Understanding the Baltic Sea Region through Art and Material Culture” (2024-2025). Full CV.

Margus Vihalem is an Associate Professor of Philosophy whose research focuses on contemporary continental philosophy, aesthetics, political philosophy and environmental philosophy. He has a particular interest in concepts of subjectivity and aesthetic experience, drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou and Rancière, but also on pragmatist like Dewey and others. He has published widely in academic journals, including recent work on everyday aesthetics, political aesthetics, and the philosophy of art. Margus has supervised both doctoral and master’s theses in philosophy and cultural theory and remains actively engaged in teaching and curriculum development at Tallinn University’s School of Humanities. 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 interests revolve around bordering—how different actors construct, negotiate and cross physical, symbolic or virtual borders in their claiming of political space. Her research draws on ethnographic research on the political spatialities and b/ordering at borderlands across China, Southeast Asia and India. Karin Dean leads the Eur-Asian Border Lab, a border studies community advancing trans-regional conversations and synergies between the Euro-American and Asian border scholars. Since 2026, she is also She has published in journals such as Political Geography; Eurasian Geography and Economics; Territory, Politics and Governance; Surveillance & Society; and serves on 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 span ecocriticism, ecofeminism, new materialism,  Blue humanities, diasporic and migrant literature, gender studies and crisis studies. Her publications include the volumes The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis (2024) and Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Routledge, 2018); special issues of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction ““Contemporary Crises in the Anglosphere: Fragmentation and Relationality in 21st-century Narratives” (forthcoming in spring 2026); Pólemos 2/2026, DeGruyter “Crisis of Democracy in Law, Literature, and Culture” (forthcoming) and Women: A Cultural Review ‘“We Too’: Female Voices in the Transnational Era of Crises, Migration, Pandemic and Climate Change” (2023). She is an investigator in the Estonian Research Council project “Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures” (PRG2592, 2025-2029). Full CV.

Alpo Honkapohja is a lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at Tallinn University. He received his PhD in English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2013. He has experience working in five countries and eight universities (Oslo, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Zurich, Lausanne, Helsinki, Turku, and finally Tallinn). He is also the current chair of the Helsinki Society for Historical Lexicography. Honkapohja's research interests focus on English historical linguistics and digital humanities, especially historical multilingualism,  medieval medicine (the bubonic plague!), quantitative codicology and abbreviation practices. He is also looking for applications in world Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca in the Baltic region. Full CV.

Daniele Monticelli is a Professor 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. He is also interested in the application of the digital humanities in research on translation (history) and in the representation of AI in literature, movies and popular culture. Full CV.

Tanya Escudero is a researcher in Translation Studies with a PhD in Translation. Her work focuses on translation and multilingual communication in contexts of migration, public services, and crisis response, as well as poetry translation and paraprofessional translation. She has led and co-led several national and international research projects, including Translation, Migration and Democracy (Kone Foundation), and Improving Communication with Migrants for Crisis Preparedness (Council of the Baltic Sea States). She is currently Project Management Officer and WP leader in the Horizon-funded WIRE project and has participated in multiple Horizon, MSCA, and EU-funded initiatives. Tanya is co-editor-in-chief of the Scopus-indexed journal Intralinea and a Steering Committee member of the History and Translation Network. At Tallinn University, she is actively involved in doctoral programme development and structured support for early-career researchers, including incoming postdoctoral fellows. 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, first and second language acquisition of Estonian, 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 also works 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 and is currently involved in projects supporting Estonian language acquisition by Ukrainian refugee children. Full CV.

Merilyn Meristo is a Professor of Language Didactics 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 the sociolinguistics of Ukrainian in Estonia and Finland. She has also written on various aspects of Family Language Policy as well as translation studies. She has authored over a hundred articles on these topics. Full CV.

Mari Uusküla is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Translation Theory. Her research interests include lexical semantics, semantic typology (especially the field of colour semantics, categorisation, and perception), machine translation and AI literacy; cognitive translator studies and translation processes; and the translation of idiomatic colour language. She has also collaborated on colour and emotion-related studies with the Institute of Psychology at the University of Lausanne. She is currently involved in the projects "Promoting machine translation literacy in higher education" and “Landscape Identity and its Expression in Language”. She has published more than 60 articles and chapters in a range of journals and successfully supervised PhD theses focused on colour semantics. Full CV.

Maris Saagpakk is an Associate Professor of German Cultural History and Literature, with a PhD in German Literature. Her research focuses on Baltic German literature and culture, Estonian translation history in the 19th century, autobiographical writing, cultural transfer, postcolonial approaches, and the use of linguistic landscape methods for teaching German language. A unifying theme in her work is the influence of German culture and literature on the languages and cultures in the Baltic region. She has published extensively, with over 70 academic publications, including journal articles, book chapters, and edited volumes with international publishers. She is currently involved in several international research projects and networks, including the project "Literary multilingualism and social transformations in superdiverse societies" funded by the European Commission. Full CV.

Kapitolina Fedorova is a Professor of Russian Studies with a PhD in Philology. She previously worked at the European University at St. Petersburg and at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea. She is currently involved in the research project “Multilingual Virtual Space of Estonia”. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, urban multilingualism, language contact, migration and border studies, linguistic landscapes, online communication, and language ideology. She has published over 50 academic articles and book chapters in recognised journals and publishers. Full CV.

Grigori Utgof is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and Literary Theory, holding PhD in Russian Philology. His research focuses on 20th-century Russian literature, poetics, Russian literary diaspora (with a particular emphasis on Nabokov studies), translation studies, and verse theory. He is the author of the book Sintakticheskie issledovania (Studies in Syntactics) and the founding editor of the Tallinn-based scholarly journal Slavica Revalensia. He has published extensively, with over 50 academic publications, including journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, etc. He has been involved in several research projects and served as principal investigator of “A Syntactic Approach to Translation Analysis”, funded by the Estonian Science Foundation. 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 three years, the initiatives at TÜHI have shown impressive success:

• 2023 Call: 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: Two researchers were successfully funded, one through an MSCA fellowship and another via an ERA fellowship. Three more candidates exceeded the qualification threshold and ot ETAg postdoctoral grants.
• 2025 Call: One candidate received an MSCA fellowship, and thirteen obtained seals of excellence and will seek funding through ETAg support scheme in March.