Areas of expertise
Biography
Kaisa Ilmonen is a University lecturer at the department of Comparative Literature. She also holds the title of Docent (Adjunct Professor) in the research of minority literatures. Ilmonen is a PI of the research project Intersectional Reading, Social Justice and Literary Activism funded by KONE foundation.
Currently, Kaisa Ilmonen is a Collegium Researcher at Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS). Her research project is called Towards Intersectional Literary Studies: Intersectionality in Aesthetics, Memory, and Education.
Ilmonen has published widely on the topics of Intersectionality, feminism, postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature, and queer studies. Her doctoral dissertation on Caribbean women’s writing was publicly defended in 2012 and was called Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff: Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity.
Ilmonen is also a member of the board of Third Space theatre company whose central focus is on the internal dialogue between and the investigation of the relationship between art and science.
Teaching
Kaisa Ilmonen's teaching and other experience at the University of Turku is versatile. As Senior lecturer she teaches widely from Introductory courses to Doctoral level. She is a supervisor in several PhD projects and has supervised numerous MA and BA -level theses. In addition to literary studies, she has a wide-ranging experience in interdisciplinary teaching, particularly in the field of gender studies, where she has also worked as a university lecturer.
Ilmonen has also taught as an Erasmus exchange teacher in the University of Trento, Italy. Furthermore, her previous university appointments include the position of student advisor at the Faculty of Humanities making her still highly motivated by any projects where she can work together with students.
Research
kaisa Ilmonen's current research focuses on methodological debates concerning intersectional reading and intersectional cultural memory. She is interested in intersectionality's genealogy, epistemology, pedagogic uses and applicability. She has also focused on the narrative organisation of scholarly debates on intersectionality.
Ilmonen is a member of the board of SELMA, the Research centre of storytelling, experientiality and memory. Between 2015 and 2017, she was granted the opportunity to work as a member of the research collegium TIAS (Turku Institute for Advanced Studies) as a post-doctoral researcher, and in 2014 she participated in the research project Out of the Ordinary: Challenging Commonplace Concepts in Anglophone Literature at the Department of English.
Ilmonen has served as a member of the board of the Society for Queer Studies in Finland for many years, and she has also worked as the editor-in-chief and a member of the editorial board of SQS Journal. Ilmonen has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Uppsala, Sweden.