JMC Personnel

Benita Heiskanen received her Ph.D. in American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin in 2004, and has since then worked in Ireland, Denmark, and Finland. Before joining the JMC, she was employed as Collegium Researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS). Within the past decade, she has led three major research projects, funded by the Research Council of Finland and the Kone Foundation. She currently directs the project, “Reproduction Wars: Imaginaries and Mobilizations in the U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region” (Research Council of Finland, 2023–2027). Through a mixed methods approach combining archival and online research, team fieldwork, cultural analysis, and a quantitative survey, the project maps the respatialization of women’s bodily rights, contested within the U.S.-Mexico Transborder region. She is a member of the University of Turku Collegiate Council (2022–2025), a past-president of the American Studies Network (2021–2023), and currently serves as member of the Advisory Board of the European Journal of American Studies (2021–2029). She is the codirector, together with the Finnish American Studies Association, of the 28th Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS), taking place at the University of Turku on June 4–6, 2025.

Prof. Heiskanen’s research and teaching deal with U.S. history, politics, and culture, as well as Transnational American Studies. Based on her recently completed Research Council of Finland project, she coedited (with Albion M. Butters and Pekka M. Kolehmainen) an open access volume, Up in Arms: Gun Imaginaries in Texas (Brill, 2022) and the forum, “Perceiving Security and Insecurity: The Campus Carry Law in Texas,” for the Journal of American Studies. Her open access article, “Un/Seeing Campus Carry: Experiencing Gun Culture in Texas,” was published in the European Journal of American Studies in 2020. Her early-career work dealt with racial/ethnic, class, and gender relations in U.S. history, society, and culture, U.S. Latino/as, the U.S.-Mexico border region, popular culture, and sport. Methodologically, she specializes in transdisciplinary research practices, ethnography, oral history, and visual analysis. Theoretically, she is interested in the politics of visual culture; the geography of the body, space, and place; and race, class, and gender formations. Prof. Heiskanen is a frequent media commentator on U.S. politics, elections, and current events.

Niko Heikkilä works as a project researcher at the JMC in the Academy of Finland-funded “Reproduction Wars: Imaginaries and Mobilizations in the U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region” (REPRO) project. In the project, Heikkilä examines the policing of women’s reproduction in Texas, focusing on how anti-abortion organizations mobilize people to surveil abortion seekers and providers. He is interested in how such groups in Texas responded to the legislative shift both in terms of assisting in and going beyond conventional policing of abortions.

His previous research has focused on the contemporary history of social movements and social conflict in the U.S., as well as issues of social control and repression and the dynamics of social change and reaction. Heikkilä received his Ph.D. in Cultural History from the University of Turku in 2021. His dissertation, “Reactionary and Revolutionary Mobilizations: The Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panther Party, and FBI Counterintelligence, 1964–1971,” examined the meanings of social change, focusing on the contested interplay between the revolutionary Panthers, the reactionary Klan, and the repression of the FBI in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Heikkilä has previously worked as a research assistant at the JMC in the research project “U.S. Election Year 2016” in the spring of 2016. In 2019-2020, he was a Fulbright visiting researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of American Studies. Recently, he was a coeditor of an edited volume on the research methods of cultural history, titled Kulttuurihistorian tutkimus: Lähteistä, menetelmiin ja tulkintaan (2022), and he has published articles in journals such as the European Journal of American Studies and American Studies in Scandinavia.

Pekka M. Kolehmainen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) and the John Morton Center for North American Studies. His project, titled "The Conceptual Language of Antifeminism and Reactionary Realignment in the United States", studies antifeminism as a bridge between different reactionary movements in U.S. history. His research focuses on the conceptual dynamics of antifeminism, examining the co-optation and redefinition of concepts in antifeminist ideological language. Kolehmainen’s larger research trajectory centers on explicating the ideological, cultural, and rhetorical dynamics of the Culture Wars in recent U.S. history and the intersections between political ideology and popular culture. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural History (2022) from the University of Turku, where his dissertation, "Rock, Freedom, and Ideologies of 'Americanness': U.S. Culture War Debates of the Late Twentieth Century", studied the use of rock as an ideological concept in U.S. political print media during the 1980s and 1990s, contextualized in the larger framework of the Culture Wars. Previously at the JMC, Kolehmainen was part of the Academy of Finland-funded Campus Carry project studying U.S. gun culture and its ideological rhetoric. On the subject, he coedited an open-access edited volume with Benita Heiskanen and Albion M. Butters, Up in Arms: Gun Imaginaries in Texas (Brill, 2022), where his research was published as the chapter “The Founding Fathers in the Temporal Imaginaries of Texas Gun Politics.” His teaching at the JMC includes the course, “Culture Wars in the United States,” and he has in the past taught the introductory course to North American Studies and a seminar on the study of popular culture. He also provides media commentary on U.S. politics and culture, with special expertise in conservatism and right-wing movements.  

Oscar Winberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) and the John Morton Center for North American Studies (JMC). His current project “Breaking the News: How Congress Remade Television News” studies congressional pressure of television news in the United States, circa 1968–1974. He received his Ph.D. from the History Department at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, in 2021. His dissertation, “Archie Bunker for President: Television Entertainment and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s,” is a political history of television entertainment and politics. He is the coeditor (with Outi Hakola, Janne Salminen, and Juho Turpeinen) of the edited collection The Culture and Politics of Populist Masculinities (Lexington 2021). His work has also appeared in the European Journal of American Studies, PS: Political Science & Politics, Finsk Tidskrift, and Lähikuva.

Winberg’s research interests include media and politics, political history, television studies, Hollywood in political life, and political journalism. His teaching focuses on modern and contemporary U.S. history, mass media, and political history. In 2018, he was a visiting researcher at the American Political History Institute at Boston University. He has also worked in different research projects at the University of Helsinki, University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University, and University of Eastern Finland. Since 2017, he has served as board member of the New Foreign Policy Society in Finland.

He is a frequent commentator in Finnish and Swedish media on United States politics, history, and culture, including as a columnist for Hufvudstadsbladet 2022-2023. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post. In 2015, he created the podcast Campaign Context, which featured some of the most prominent historians and political scientists in the United States as guests, for the JMC. Together with Anna Bäck of Yle, he created the award-winning radio series Trump och USA – valet 2020 for Yle in 2020.

At the JMC, Jaakko Dickman is part of the CUBAFLUX project, funded by the KONE Foundation. In the project, Dickman works with visual materials collected from fieldwork periods. He has created the project’s website, and curated its visual archive, which will be used in teaching and for the benefit of the broad public and media. In addition, he has written a popular article and participated in conference presentations. At the JMC, he has prepared funding applications as well as participated in various visual design projects promoting the JMC’s scholars’ activities and events. He served as a TA in the “JMCT0006 Introduction to North American Studies” course in fall 2022 and he coordinated courses “Organizing Osmo” and “Film Pass” in spring 2023. He first came to the JMC as an intern in March 2020.

Jaakko specializes in online community and visual culture research. He has a Master of Arts degree from the Department of Media Studies at the University of Turku. His master’s thesis “Breitbart as an Affective Community: The Case of the Capitol Hill Riots,” analyzes the role of emotions in the processes of interpretation and community building in right-wing online news comment sections in the United States. He was accepted to conduct his Ph.D. dissertation at the Doctoral Programme of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Turku in 2023. The dissertation examines visual politics of post-left communities in the context of the United States. In 2024, Dickman received a four-year full-time grant for his research from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. 

Nadia Nava works as a researcher in the CUBAFLUX project, funded by the Kone Foundation. Her research revolves around the effects of Cuba's recent, state-led digital revolution in people's lives, focusing on the transnational public sphere and the emergence of new digital economies. She is particularly interested in 1) urban imaginaries in social media, 2) youth internet cultures and the appearance of Cuban influencers, and 3) digital diaspora experiences. This Fall, she will be the instructor in charge of the Current Issues Seminar "Cuba-U.S. Relations in Flux."

Nava holds a master's degree in History of the Americas from Universidad Michoacana (Mexico). She is currently completing a doctoral degree in political history at the University of Helsinki. Her work has been guided by a broad interest in Interamerican relations and Mexico's historical ties with Europe. In her doctoral dissertation on Mexican-Finnish relations during the 20th Century, she explores the construction of mutual imaginaries with an emphasis on printed culture. She has taught Mexican history at the undergraduate level, including a course at the University of Helsinki, and commented on current Mexican and Cuban issues in the media.  

Mila Seppälä is working on her Ph.D. dissertation at the John Morton Center for North American Studies as a doctoral researcher fully funded by the Doctoral Program of Social and Behavioural Sciences Her research focuses on youth activism and the development of political imagination in the gun violence prevention movement in the United States. She has worked on multiple publications together with the Campus Carry project including the co-written essay on student testimonials on Campus Carry in the Journal of American Studies (2021) and a book chapter in the open access volume Up in Arms: Gun Imaginaries in Texas (Brill, 2022). She has previously taught a seminar course on social movements in the United States in the North American Studies (NAMS) program as well given guest lectures on U.S. elections, youth political participation and African American hair. She also worked as a TA for Professor Benita Heiskanen on her “Race, Class, and Gender in U.S. History and Culture” course.

Seppälä spent the academic year 2021–2022 at The University of Texas at Austin as a Fulbright grantee conducting fieldwork for her dissertation and studying in the American Studies program. Previously at the JMC, she worked as project researcher for the “Tragediauutisoinnin haasteet – median mahdollisuudet käsitellä kouluampumisia” project, which focused on the challenges media faced while reporting on the Parkland, Florida school shooting in 2018. She finished her master’s degree in 2018 in the Department of English at the University of Turku, specializing in discourse studies and legal language. She has written about topics such as gun politics, youth activism, TikTok and the 2020 presidential elections for Turun Sanomat and the SAM Magazine.

Julia Niinistö is Contemporary History major at the University of Turku currently working on her master’s degree. The topics present in her thesis work are political memes and how politicians are portrayed in them. In 2023, Niinistö graduated with a Bachelor of Social Sciences, with the thesis titled "Poliittisissa meemeissä esitetyt johtajuuskuvat Yhdysvaltain presidentinvaaleissa 2016" [Portrayals of Leadership in Political Memes during the 2016 US Presidential Election]. Through her research, she is looking to discover how memes can facilitate political participation and how political spaces URL are affecting political climate and discussions IRL.

Niinistö is especially interested in discovering the potential variables which can affect the portrayal of politicians in memes: be it gender, socio-economic background, race etc. The intersections of what kind of attributes are highlighted in the memes are of interest, since this can broaden our understanding of how politicians are viewed in online political spaces. Continuing to develop her research skills, Niinistö is looking to bring her expertise and enthusiasm on online political spaces and visual forms of online political communication to the JMC.

Ella Laattala is currently working on her master’s degree in political science at the University of Turku. Her thesis studies the combined effects of gender and partisanship on attitudes towards women’s rights in the US. She graduated with a Bachelor of Social Sciences in 2023 after studying Supreme Court nominations under the title “Trumpin tuomarit – Yhdysvaltain korkeimman oikeuden strategisten nimitysten rajoitteet Donald J. Trumpin presidenttikaudella” [Trump’s Judges – The Limitations of Strategic Nominations to the US Supreme Court under President Donald J. Trump]. Academically, Laattala is interested in political institutions and their interaction with individuals, especially in combination with civil rights.

At the JMC, Laattala is especially looking forward to participating in academic research projects and learning about the center’s work in sharing expertise through media outlets, partnerships, events, and other communication channels.

As an affiliate researcher at the JMC, Albion M. Butters is currently editing a forthcoming volume on the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.

Butters received his Ph.D. in the History of Religion at Columbia University in 2006 and moved to Finland in 2009. His extended academic interests in Cultural Studies and American Studies led him to the JMC in 2015. His first project there was a special issue (European Journal of American Studies) on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, co-edited with Benita Heiskanen, which focused on popularizing politics. This was followed by a second special issue (WiderScreen) on the 2020 election, co-edited with Oscar Winberg and Pekka M. Kolehmainen, which featured media and politics as the theme. In this period, Butters also formally joined the JMC as a Research Fellow. As a member of the Academy of Finland-funded Campus Carry project, he was integrally involved in both its quantitative and qualitative research dimensions. He produced ten peer-reviewed publications for the project, including the open-access volume Up in Arms: Gun Imaginaries in Texas (Brill, 2022), co-edited with Benita Heiskanen and Pekka M. Kolehmainen. In 2024, he received the Title of Docent in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Turku. Aside from his ongoing research at the JMC, Butters currently serves as co-editor of the open-access journal Studia Orientalia Electronica and Senior Editor at Khyentse Vision Project.

Dr. Tuula Kolehmainen won the 2023 Rob Kroes award for her Ph.D. dissertation, “Like Men They Stood”: Black Male Vulnerability as Resistance to Stereotypes in Fiction Written by African American Women (2022). Her dissertation, which is to be published via Brill, focuses on fiction written by African American female authors from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. In addition, she has published an essay on Jhumpa Lahiri’s short fiction in the Keltaiset esseet collection (2016), an article on Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby in the journal American Studies in Scandinavia (2018), and her chapter on Toni Cade Bambara’s short fiction was published in the anthology Mediating Vulnerability: Comparative Approaches and Questions of Genre (2021) by UCL Press.

At the JMC, Kolehmainen develops her postdoctoral project, “Playing with Power and Vulnerability in African American Stand-up,” thus turning her focus on self-representation of Black male vulnerability. While her Ph.D. project largely rests on Black feminist and intersectional theories (in addition to Black male studies and literary studies), her current research incorporates Black male studies and humor studies to produce new knowledge of Black male vulnerability and its connection to humor. Kolehmainen is experienced in stand-up comedy herself, with over 400 performances including the Finnish Channel 4 show Nelosen Stand up!

Currently working as a University Instructor of English at Tampere University, Kolehmainen has previously taught the courses “Short Fiction by African American Women in Context” and “African American Cultural Expression” for the North American Studies program at the JMC. Kolehmainen is also a member of board and communications officer of The Finnish American Studies Association (FASA).

	Professor of North American Studies, Director of the JMC Benita Heiskanen University of Turku		Professor of Political Science Nina Tynkkynen Åbo Akademi University
	Professor of Cultural History Hannu Salmi University of Turku		PhD, University Lecturer, Political Science Juha Vuori University of Turku

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Dr. Pirkko Markula, Docent of North American Physical Culture
pirkko.markula@ualberta.ca

Pirkko Markula is a professor of socio-cultural studies of physical activity and the associate dean research in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include social analyses of dance, exercise, and sport in which she has employed several theoretical lenses ranging from critical, cultural studies research to Foucault and Deleuze. She is also a contemporary dancer and choreographer. 

• Author of Deleuze and the Physically Active Body (Routledge, 2019)

• Co-author, with Michael Silk, of Qualitative Research for Physical Culture (Routledge, 2011)

• Co-author with Richard Pringle, of Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self (Routledge, 2006)

• Editor of Feminist Sport Studies: Sharing Joy, Sharing Pain (SUNY Press, 2005)

• Editor of Olympic women and the media: International perspectives (Palgrave, 2009)

• Co-editor with Marianne Clark of The Evolving Feminine Ballet Body (University of Alberta Press, 2018)

• Co-editor with William Bridel and Jim Denison of Endurance running: A socio-cultural examination (Routledge, 2016)

• Co-editor with Eileen Kennedy of Women and Exercise: Body, Health and Consumerism (Routledge, 2011)

• Co-editor, with Sarah Riley, Maree Burns, Hannah Frith and Sally Wiggins, of Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management (Palgrave, 2007)

• Co-editor, with Jim Denison, of Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research (Peter Lang, 2003)

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	Ambassador Mikko Hautala  Ministry for Foreign Affairs		CEO Alexandra Pasternak-Jackson Amcham
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	Director General Elina Anttila National Museum of Finland		Licensed psychologist, occupational health psychologist, sports psychologist, psychotherapist trainee Tuomas Grönman Psychology Expert Consulting Firm, Tuomas Grönman Ltd.
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	Director Johanna Ikävalko Arctic Centre, University of Lapland		SVP, R&D Pasi Järvenpää Teleste
	Member of Parliament Jani Kokko Social Democratic Parliamentary Group		Director Hanna-Leena Korteniemi Unit for North America, Ministry for Foreign Affairs
	Vice Rector, Professor Teemu Leinonen University of the Arts Helsinki & Aalto University Photo: Aalto University/Veera Konsti		Chief Executive Officer Terhi Mölsä Fulbright Finland Foundation
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	Senior Research Fellow, LL.D. Ville Sinkkonen Center on US Politics and Power (CUSPP) at The Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA)		Foreign News Correspondent, Two-time US Correspondent, Producer Paula Vilén The Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE Photo: Yle

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Benita Heiskanen, Professor of North American Studies, University of Turku

Nina Tynkkynen, Professor, Political Science Unit, Åbo Akademi University

Hannu Salmi, Professor, Cultural History, University of Turku

Henri Vogt, Professor of Political Science, University of Turku

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	Senior Specialist Eero Hokkanen Ministry of Transport and Communications		Associate Professor Minna Ruckenstein Center for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki Helsinki Center for Digital Humanities
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	SVP, Sustainability and Corporate Affairs Minna Aila Neste		Manager of International Affairs Mika Akkanen City of Turku
	Director Ulla Bergström Stoa Cultural Centre		Creative Director and Head of Scripted Seija-Liisa Eskola Warner Bros. Finland
	Executive Director Lena Grenat SAM		Professor Emeritus Markku Henriksson University of Helsinki
	Strategic Content Coordination Specialist Taina Iduozee Embassy of the United States		Author Juha Itkonen
	Director, Unit for North America Soili Kangaskorpi Ministry for Foreign Affairs		President Ulla Koski Helsingin Sanomat Foundation
	Associate Professor of New Media Design and Learning Teemu Leinonen Aalto University		Juan Carlos Moya Business Investment Solutions JCM Consulting
	Researcher, Writer, Lecturer Mary McDonald-Rissanen		Chief Executive Officer Terhi Mölsä Fulbright Finland Foundation
	Journalist Mette Nordström YLE		Chief Executive Officer Alexandra Pasternak-Jackson Amcham Finland
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	Managing Editor Laura Saarikoski Helsingin Sanomat		Educational Curator, Board Member Leena Svinhufvud Design Museum, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation
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	Senior Lecturer David Yoken Turku University of Applied Sciences

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