{"id":112,"date":"2026-03-04T14:42:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T12:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.uef.fi\/vera-conference-2026\/?page_id=112"},"modified":"2026-03-18T12:59:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T10:59:33","slug":"keynote-speakers-panellists","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.uef.fi\/vera-conference-2026\/keynote-speakers-panellists\/","title":{"rendered":"Keynote speakers &amp; Panellists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Sanna Turoma<\/strong>\u00a0is a Professor in Russian language and culture at Tampere University with a specialisation in culture, literature and humanities in Russian area studies. Her research and teaching interests span the interactions between culture and society, intellectual histories, and imperial and spatial knowledge production in the Eurasian context. Turoma\u2019s recent publications include\u00a0<em>Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia<\/em>\u00a0(with Beumers, Etkind, Gurova; Routledge 2018) and\u00a0<em>Russia as Civilization: Politics, Media, and Academia: Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media and Academia<\/em>\u00a0(with Mj\u00f6r, Routledge 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Nana Sharikadze<\/strong> is an affiliated Associate Professor and the Head of the International Research Centre of Georgian Studies at Caucasus University, Tbilisi, Georgia. As a Musicologist, Dr Sharikadze has conducted extensive research in various musical domains, including 20th-century musical theatre and opera, experimental music, the intersection of politics and music, Georgian music, and Soviet music. Currently, her focus is on Soviet music, exploring unique perspectives related to colonisation and decolonisation. In 2023, Dr. Sharikadze published the monograph\u00a0<em>An Introduction to Georgian Art Music: Sense-Making Through Music<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge Scholar Publishing). Her article <em>Throwing Off the Russian Lenses from Soviet Music: The Colonization and Decolonization of Georgian and Ukrainian Music<\/em> on the role of music in Georgian and Ukrainian society and politics was published in 2024 in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Connor Doak <\/strong>is a scholar of Russian and comparative literature at the University of Bristol, UK. He received his PhD degree in Slavic languages and literature from Northwestern University in 2013. His research explores the relationship between art and lived experience, language and power, as well as theory and practice, with a particular interest in cultural manifestations of gender and sexuality and how they travel across borders. He co-edited (with Stephen Hutchings and Andy Byford) Transnational Russian Studies (2020), which offered a new approach for research and teaching in the field. The three scholars reunited again to publish \u2018Russian and Slavonic Studies at the Crossroads\u2019, a Talking Point in Forum for Modern Languages Studies that reconsiders the transnational approach in the light of the decolonial turn and Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Panellists<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Julia Bethwaite<\/strong> is a Postdoctoral researcher in International Relations at Tampere University. Her research interests consider power and the role of art in international relations and world politics, practices of cultural diplomacy and museum diplomacy, transnational cultural relations, international political economy of art, elite networks, global governance and interaction of state and non-state actors. She has also analysed forms of power in the transnational field of art by researching artistic sites and by focusing on &#8216;Russian&#8217; actors. In her dissertation, she studied how the Russian state and elites accumulated power in and through the transnational field of art.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Katharina Kunter<\/strong> is a Professor of Contemporary Church History at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki<strong>. <\/strong>Her research focuses on the history of the long 20th century in Europe, with an emphasis on the intersections between political history, religion and culture. &nbsp;Kunter&#8217;s subsequent studies, including her 2004 Habilitation thesis and 2016 book <em>Churches and Communism<\/em>,&nbsp;explore Christian political opposition and Eigensinn in communist Central and Eastern Europe, with a particular emphasis on Protestantism in the GDR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Jussi M\u00e4kel\u00e4<\/strong> is a University Teacher in Visual Arts Education at the School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education at the UEF. As a researcher, educator and artist, his work, including his doctoral thesis <em>The Question of the Human Scale: Art Education as a Possibility in the Age of Technology<\/em> (in Finnish, 2025), Dr M\u00e4kel\u00e4 explores the relationship between art, knowledge, different forms of agency and resistance in the context of contemporary life driven by instrumental rationality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Pekka Suutari<\/strong> is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. With a background in ethnomusicology and folklore studies, his has studied the minority music and cultures as signifying practices and political and aesthetic activities.&nbsp;He has also written about Finnish popular music among the Finns in Sweden and contemporary folk music in Petrozavodsk, Russian Karelia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sanna Turoma\u00a0is a Professor in Russian language and culture at Tampere University with a specialisation in culture, literature and humanities in Russian area studies. Her research and teaching interests span the interactions between culture and society, intellectual histories, and imperial and spatial knowledge production in the Eurasian context. Turoma\u2019s recent publications include\u00a0Cultural Forms of Protest [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1371,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-112","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Keynote speakers &amp; Panellists - VERA Conference 2026: Art, Culture, and Power. 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