University of Gothenburg
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Katarina Leppänen

Professor

Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion
Telephone
+46 31-786 58 72
+46 766-18 58 72
Mail
katarina.leppanen@lir.gu.se

About Katarina Leppänen

I have a professorship in History of Ideas/Intellectual History. My current research project is a monograph called (preliminary) "The soft power of cultural diplomacy: Literature and politics in the lives of Aino Kallas, Hella Wuolijoki and Elin Wägner c. 1900–1950" (RJ-sabbatical). Previously i worked in a large research program called ”Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures” program led by Stefan Helgesson at Stockholm universitet (http://worldlit.se/). During the academic year 2009-2010 I was employed at Åbo Akademi University in Finland at the Department of Gender Studies and thereafter at Uppsala University. Previous research includes projects such as ”Representation and articulation of national identity in Finland and Estonia 1900-1940: Theoretical readings of Aino Kallas and Hella Wuolijoki”, ”From suffrage to citizenship” and ”Gender, race, sexuality: Constructivism or essentialism”. I have also worked as the editor of the journal for intellectual history, Lychnos, and the Swedish gender studies journal Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift and on the editorial boards of Baltic Worlds and Ideas in History.

In 2005 I defended my thesis on the Swedish feminist Elin Wägner and her involvement in the European women’s movement, especially focusing on ideas about, gender, nature and history, Elin Wägner’s Alarm Clock: Ecofeminist Theory in the Interwar Era, Lanham, Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. I have since then published widely on ecocriticism and recent publications in the area include “Building a new world on the ruins of Helsinki: Critical utopia in Annika Luther’s The City of the Homeless” (in Storying the Ecocatastrophe, eds. Helena Duffy and Katarina Leppänen, Routledge 2024) and “Critical Utopia or Climate Change Dystopia?” (in Contemporary Ecocritical Methods eds. Camilla Brudin Borg, Jørgen Bruhn and Rikard Wingård, Lexington Books 2024).My research interests include international issues relating to gender and ecology, gender and nationalism , gender and the League of Nations in the interwar era, such as trafficking in women, married women’s nationality and education for internationalism. More recently I have engaged in research on religion, sexuality and emancipation.