Keynote speakers

Our visiting keynote speaker will be Professor Rita Felski (University of Virginia). The other keynote will be given by Professor Kuisma Korhonen (University of Oulu). The author guest is novelist and non-fiction writer Jenni Räinä.

 

RITA FELSKI

A long-awaited guest arrives in Oulu as the keynote speaker for The Finnish Literary Research Society’s 2026 conference: Professor Rita Felski from the University of Virginia. Professor Felski’s work has been characterized by the goal of challenging established practices of reading. The Gender of Modernity (1995) and Literature after Feminism (2003) advanced a gender-aware mode of reading. Uses of Literature (2008), recently translated into Finnish, explores the interaction between text and reader, paying special attention to affect. The Limits of Critique (2015), in turn, questions the intellectual habits of a suspicious, contextualizing mode of reading, such as the sealing of works into historical “containers”. In its place, Felski outlines a “postcritical reading” that, even while contextualizing, does justice to the vitality of texts across time and refuses to pit the reader’s capacity to think against their capacity to feel.

https://english.as.virginia.edu/people/rita-felski

 

KUISMA KORHONEN

The second keynote speech at the conference will be given by Kuisma Korhonen, Professor of Literature at the University of Oulu. The particular emphasis of his work has been the relationship of essayistic and other literary writing to ethics, politics, history, and memory. His books include Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter (2004), Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate (ed., 2006), and Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics (co-ed., 2018).

 

JENNI RÄINÄ

Jenni Räinä (b. 1980), the guest author of the annual conference of the Finnish Literary Research Society, is a writer and journalist living in Oulu. Her work includes both novels requiring extensive background research and aesthetically ambitious works of non-fiction.

The nonfiction book Reunalla. Tarinoita Suomen tyhjeneviltä sivukyliltä (“On the Edge. Stories from Finland’s Emptying Rural Villages”), created together with photographer Vesa Ranta, received the 2018 Botnia Literary Prize, and Metsä meidän jälkeemme (“The Forest After Us”), a joint effort of several writers, won the Finlandia Prize for Non-Fiction in 2019. Her works share a critical perspective on the prevailing pursuit of economic growth and efficiency, and a concern for the people and environments pushed aside by that pursuit.

Räinä’s debut novel Suo muistaa (“The Bog Remembers”, 2022) continues her nonfiction’s familiar exploration of the human relationship with nature and reflects, sometimes ironically, on our possibilities for detaching ourselves from a productivity-driven economy. Her historical novel Vaino (“Persecution”), published in 2025, is not only a “fictional genealogy” but also a sharply topical portrayal of a war of conquest, oppression, and suffering.

In the author interview (in Finnish), we will hear what this seasoned traveler along the border of the real and the imagined thinks about what separates fact from fiction, how she approaches writing them, and what their significance is in our time.