FASA Board (2025–2026)

Dr. Nina Öhman is currently a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Recently she has worked as a University Lecturer in Musicology at the Department of Philosophy, History and Arts, University of Helsinki. She completed her doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania and she also holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a musicologist/ethnomusicologist studying women’s roles in music cultures, the singing voice, and American popular music. While situated broadly in musicology her work incorporates varied branches of knowledge including, inter alia, economic ethnomusicology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, religious studies, anthropology, and sociology. In parallel, she is interested in academically-based community engagement and collaborative research methods. She has published several articles in international and Finnish journals, among her publications are a chapter on collaborative research and ethnomusicological training (co-authored with Carol Muller) in the anthology Transforming Ethnomusicology (Oxford University Press, 2021) and “Vocal Virtuosity, Value Creation, and the Transformation of Contemporary Gospel Music” in The Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology (2021). She is currently the vice-chair of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology (SES) and the chief editor of the society’s Musiikin suunta -journal.

Dr. Reetta Humalajoki is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Department of Cultural History and Department of European and World History at the University of Turku. She is also PI on the project “Fake, Steal, Borrow? The Appropriation of Indigenous Cultures in Finland throughout the 1900s”, funded by the Kone Foundation. She completed her Ph.D. in 2016 at Durham University. At the University of Turku, she has previously held the positions of Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher and University Lecturer at the John Morton Center for North American Studies, and University Teacher of history at the School of History, Culture, and Arts Studies. In addition, she has been a visiting research fellow at Northumbria University (2017), the British Library’s Eccles Centre for North American Studies (2017), the University of Ottawa (2018), and the University of Saskatchewan (2018).​ Her research focuses on Indigenous political agency and policy-making in the United States and Canada, as well as transnational solidarity, internationalism, and cultural appropriation. Her 2020 article in Cold War History was awarded an article prize honorary mention by the Historians of the Twentieth Century United States. Her work has also been published in the Canadian Historical Review, British Journal of Canadian Studies, Comparative American Studies, Journal of American Studies, and Western Historical Quarterly.

Dr. Elina Siltanen is currently University Lecturer at the Department of English, University of Eastern Finland. Previously, she has taught at the University of Turku, Lund University and Luleå University of Technology. She was also the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research focuses on the role of affect in reading contemporary American poetry, and her current project is entitled Affective Border-Crossings: Reading for Human-Nature-Culture Connections in Anglophone Literatures. Her recent publications include an article on the connections between conceptual and confessional poetry in the Journal of Modern Literature (2020) and an article entitled “American Evil: Steven Zultanski’s Bribery, Liberal Guilt and the Quest for Authenticity”, written with João Paulo Guimarães (English Studies 2023). Her book, Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry: John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, was published by John Benjamins in 2016.

Vincent Veerbeek is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. He graduated from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, with a BA in American Studies (2018) and an MA in Historical Studies (2020). In 2019, he was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Riverside where he researched government boarding school Sherman Institute, and he wrote his master’s thesis about economic education at the school. Currently, he is writing a doctoral dissertation with the working title “In Tune with the Nation? Marching Bands and Native American Influences on Music Education at United States Off-Reservation Boarding Schools.” His dissertation studies the history of marching band music at government schools for Native American children between the 1880s and the 1930s and seeks to better understand Indigenous agency and mobility within settler-colonial structures. During the 2023–2024 academic year, he was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Dr. Tuula Kolehmainen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Morton Center for North American Studies (JMC) at the University of Turku. Her dissertation, which won the 2023 Rob Kroes award and will be published via Brill, focuses on fiction written by African American female authors from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. In addition, Kolehmainen has published an essay on Jhumpa Lahiri’s short fiction in the Keltaiset esseet collection (2016), an article on Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby in the journal American Studies in Scandinavia (2018), and her chapter on Toni Cade Bambara’s short fiction was published in the anthology Mediating Vulnerability: Comparative Approaches and Questions of Genre (2021) by UCL Press. At the JMC, Kolehmainen works on her postdoctoral project, Playing with Power and Vulnerability in African American Stand-up, funded by the Turku University Foundation. Kolehmainen is experienced in stand-up comedy herself, with over 400 performances including the Finnish Channel 4 show Nelosen Stand up!

Dr. Pekka Kilpeläinen works as a university lecturer in English Language and Culture at the University of Eastern Finland. He has recently been working as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow, focusing on the narratives of cultural memory in contemporary African American fiction. His research interests include the literatures and cultures of the black diaspora, the intersectionalities of the categories as race, sexuality, and gender, utopian studies, and cultural trauma. His book Postcategorical Utopia (Peter Lang, forthcoming) charts the political unconscious of the utopian impulse towards alternative futures in James Baldwin’s fiction. His most recent article “When the Utopian Impulse ‘Fails’: Queer Spatialities of Traumatic Cultural Memory in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits” (2021) appears in Amerikastudien/American Studies. His articles have also been published in such journals as Atlantic Studies: Global Currents and The European Journal of American Studies, and in several anthologies, including The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2020).

Mila Seppälä is a doctoral researcher at the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku. Her research focuses on youth activism and political imagination in the gun violence prevention movement in the United States. Her research has been funded by the Doctoral Program of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Turku, Alfred Kordelin Foundation, and the Fulbright Finland Foundation. She has published articles on the gun violence prevention movement and gun politics in Political Behavior (2024), Journal of Mass Violence Research, Journal of American Studies (2021), and a book chapter in the open-access volume Up in Arms: Gun Imaginaries in Texas (2022). In 2025, she will begin working as postdoc researcher on the project “Politics at the Brink of Collapse,” where she will examine utopian praxis and political imagination in intentional communities. 

Ari Räisänen works as a part time lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland. His dissertation Narrative Battlescapesexamines how war fiction written by American veterans of the War on Terror creates counternarratives that challenge popular imaginings of war, soldiering, and the nation. In addition to war fiction, his research interests include the cultural memory of war and how it shapes national belonging as well as the role of violence in American culture. His work has appeared in American Studies in Scandinavia and the European Journal of American Studies.