«I am originally from Finland and was born in Vantaa, which is the fourth biggest city in Finland, but mainly famous for the Helsinki-Vantaa airport. Helsinki is where I spent most of my life and where I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Helsinki.
However, my life took a turn for more international ten years ago in 2011, when I moved to Switzerland for my PhD and to work on a corpus project called Corpus of Medieval Latin from Anglo-Saxon Sources (MLASS). My PhD had to do with Middle English manuscripts and was eventually published as a monograph Alchemy, Medicine and Commercial Book Production: A Codicological and Linguistic Study of the Voigts-Sloane Manuscript Group (Brepols, 2017).
After six years in Switzerland, I lived for four years in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I initially worked on a Corpus Approach to Manuscript Abbreviations (CAMA) hosted by the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics (AMC). I spend my Covid-19 lockdowns, preparing an AMC project called From Inglis to Scots: Mapping Sounds to Spellings (FITS) for publication as well as a Teaching Fellow, teaching Finnish for Brits and linguistics and English Language for undergraduates over Zoom and Teams.
I came to Oslo in September 2021 to work on a two-year EU-funded project called Index of Middle English Prose: Digital Cotton Catalogue Project (IMEP-DCCP). The Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP) is the most important reference tool for Middle English non-verse texts composed between c. 1200 and 1500. The EU-funded IMEP DCCP project will develop and test a digital search tool that will enable access to all entries across the different IMEP catalogues and search for texts despite spelling variation. The prototype of the tool will be based on the famous Cotton collection, collected by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631), now located in the British Library. These manuscripts have been described as ‘the most important collection of manuscripts ever assembled in Britain by a private individual’ (hyperlink: https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/cotton-manuscripts). The project will also lead to the publication of a new IMEP volume of the Cotton group of manuscripts. The volume was started by Brian Donaghey (University of Sheffield), but he, unfortunately, passed away before he could finish it.
I will work with Associate Professor Jacob Thaisen and Professor Emeritus Kari Anne Rand, who is the editor in chief of the IMEP.
Outside the academia, I enjoy doing visual arts, especially oil painting and urban sketching. I’ve been pretty good at arts, since I was young, and I find they work very for relaxation as they put me in a completely different headspace than academic work.
I also try to keep fit, but the only sports I am good at are long distance running and cross-country skiing, which means I am very much looking forward to the winter, and Holmenkollen.»