Suvi Karila profile picture
Suvi
Karila
Project Coordinator, Research Services
Project Coordinator
Research Funding

Contact

+358 29 450 4878
+358 50 431 9501
Vesilinnantie 5
20500
Turku

Areas of expertise

Tutkimusrahoitus
atheism
nonreligion
United States
cultural history
gender history

Biography

I work as a project coordinator at the Department of Computing. Currently, a major part of my work is coordination of AI Academy, a center of University of Turku for artificial intelligence research and education.

I’m also a PhD candidate of cultural history. I study the cultural history of nonreligion under title "Your God is no longer mine" - Lived Nonreligion of Four Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States.

Teaching

2018-2019, fall of 2019

Memory and Narrative seminar

Master's-level seminar for students of cultural history who are in the process of writing their thesis. I taught the seminar together with Liisa Lalu and Karoliina Sjö.

2016-2017
Battling over 'America': A Historical Look at the Culture Wars in the United States.
The course examined the basics of the "culture war" thesis, its main arguments and its most prominent criticisms, and then explore the historical dimensions of the tensions over “America” and “Americanness” that lie at the core of the “culture wars.” I taught the course together with Pekka Kolehmainen.

Research

My PhD project focuses on the cultural history of nonreligion: I study the lived unbelief of women in the context of the 19th century United States. Female unbelief in the 19th century is especially important to explore since unbelief was particularly problematic for women, as a significant part of “true womanhood,” the cultural construction of an ideal woman, was piety. I ask what kinds of spaces of agency the identity of an unbeliever opened and closed for women who questioned the very nature of woman as the more religious sex. How did women manage to combine womanhood and unbelief in their everyday life in this challenging context, how did they live unbelief? My research builds upon the texts written by women as well as the various freethinker periodicals, including the most long-lived publications The Boston Investigator and The Truth Seeker.

Publications

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Tekoäly haltuun humanisti! (2021)

Hiiskuttua: Turun yliopiston humanistisen tiedekunnan verkkolehti
Suvi Karila
(Artikkeli ammattilehdessä tai kirjoitus ammatillisessa blogissa (D1))

Maailman rikkain yliopisto (2016)

Hiiskuttua: Turun yliopiston humanistisen tiedekunnan verkkolehti
Karila Suvi
(Artikkeli ammattilehdessä tai kirjoitus ammatillisessa blogissa (D1))

Ikuista elämää taivaassa ja Twitterissä (2015)

Hiiskuttua: Turun yliopiston humanistisen tiedekunnan verkkolehti
Suvi Karila, Ulla Moilanen, Ringa Takanen
(Kirjoitus tai data-artikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä (B1))