Welcoming Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Mari Hatavara
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Welcoming Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Mari Hatavara
February 1, 2024
The UT Humanities Center is excited to welcome its first Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence, Mari Hatavara, to Knoxville!
Hatavara is Chair Professor of Finnish Literature at Tampere University in Finland. Her research interests include narrative theory and analysis, free indirect discourse, unnatural narrative communication, ekphrasis (the rhetorical literary description of a scene or work of art), fictionality, and the poetics of historical fiction and metafiction. Most recently, with Academy of Finland funding, she and a team of colleagues have been exploring how literature reflects and conditions social life. She is co-director and chair of the Executive Board of Narrare, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies, at Tampere University. She earned MA (1999) and PhD (2007) degrees in Finnish Literature from the University of Tampere.
Hatavara will be in residence at the UTHC during spring semester 2024. During her residency, she will conduct research and participate in the scholarly community at the UTHC and on campus more broadly. Professor Hatavara plans a collaborative research project with UT’s Lois Presser (Professor of Sociology and Distinguished Professor in the Humanities) to illuminate important points of contact in narrative studies between event and experience. They will examine data from interviews with victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Hatavara also will give four presentations over the 5-month period of her visit, including a free public talk, “Computational Recognition of Narratives,” for the Dialogues digital humanities mini-series, part of the Humanities Center’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
It is expected that multiple units at UT will gain richly from Hatavara’s time in residence, including the Departments of English, History, World Languages & Cultures, and Sociology, as well as the UT Humanities Center. Dr. Hatavara is a foremost narrative theorist, with expertise in narrative as both social and literary phenomenon. UT students and faculty will benefit from her cross-cultural thinking, and her insights from a Nordic welfare state celebrated for its approaches to trenchant social problems and conflicts with global neighbors.