Team
Tuula
Tuula Juvonen
Dr Soc. Sci. Tuula Juvonen leads the research project Picture Me: Presenting queer visual history. Her subproject, "Queer Traces of Early Feminists – Affective-material re-reading of historic photographs", focuses on the queer reading of the photographs taken from early Finnish feminists in the turn of the 20th century. Moreover, she works as a university lecturer in Gender Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She has published on local and national lesbian and queer history, queer activism, and methods of queer history writing. Juvonen has been awarded for her ongoing collaboration with memory institutions to preserve Finnish LGBTQ+ histories, and she is a cofounder and a former chairperson of the registered association Friends of Queer History (Sateenkaarihistorian ystävät).
Olli Kleemola
Dr. Soc. Sci. Olli Kleemola is Adjunct Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Turku. In his subproject, "Queering Visual History – mining war-time photo albums", Senior Researcher Kleemola explores aspects of queerness in wartime photo albums of Finnish army soldiers.
He is the founder of the Finnish network of visual history and is specialised in the use of photographs as historical sources, as well as the social and cultural history of military & war.
Emil Santtu Uuttu
Emil Santtu Uuttu’s writing and stage works explore deep time, constant change, and pleasure, as well as the role of memory institutions and historical research. Uuttu assists the project by finding queer and trans images from various archives. Uuttu also participates in the project's activities, discussions and reading groups.
Beyond the project, Uuttu develops independent artistic work in collaboration with photographer and dancer Jussi Ulkuniemi, documentary filmmaker Vieno Järventausta, and sculptor and sound designer Roy Boswell.
Kaisa Tolvanen
Kaisa Tolvanen is a historian, whose postdoctoral subproject, "Fragile and Vibrant Lives – queer photographs and assembled materiality", focuses on queer domesticities of female couples from the 1930s —1980s as portrayed in photographs of their shared homes or summer cottages. Kaisa has previously worked with archival photographs, new materialist theories, and religious studies.
In the PicMe project, she is especially enthusiastic about writing the Handbook for Best Practice because archival work is what she loves! Kaisa is also looking forward to visiting the University of Brighton's Photography Research Excellence Group as a guest researcher.
Joe Jukes
In their postdoctoral subproject, "Queer Rural Exposures: seeing queer space and feeling queer time(s) in Finnish photo collections", Dr. Joe Jukes is researching queer people who lived or worked in rural Finland. Analysing the photographs of a gay archaeologist, a lesbian photographer and a queer ITE-artist, Joe draws on their expertise in visual geographies and queer theory to appraise how space is figured in archival photo collections, as well as how it can transmit (queer) affect through the photo record.
In 2027, Joe will take their research first to the University of Oxford to work with Prof. Matt Cook, and then to the University of Toronto to work with Prof. Elspeth Brown.