Get to know our ELBOW-team!
Associate Professor Soile Ylivuori
Project Leader
Associate Professor Professor Soile Ylivuori received her doctoral degree from the University of Helsinki in 2016, where her dissertation on 18th-century women’s subversive use of embodied politeness was examined by Karen Harvey (Sheffield) and Ludmilla Jordanova (Durham) and awarded the highest degree. Dr Ylivuori has previously held an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Helsinki, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship at QMUL, and a Beinecke and Lewis Walpole Library Research Fellowship at Yale, as well as worked as a visiting researcher at UCLA and University of Cambridge. In addition, she was a Core Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS).
She has published extensively on the history of the body, gender, experience, and the circulation of knowledge and power. Her publications include the monograph Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England (Routledge, 2019) as well as peer-reviewed articles in journals including Historical Journal and Cultural & Social History. She is currently finalising her second monograph which engages with the history of embodiment, emotions, and experience by examining the 18th-century British Caribbean as a space of decomposition of bodies and matter.
Email me: soile.ylivuori@helsinki.fi
MSS Edna Huotari
Doctoral Researcher
Edna Huotari, MSS, is a doctoral researcher in the ELBOW-project. Her Bachelor’s and Master’s studies were in social and moral philosophy and her current research investigates medical electricity through the framework of critical theory. She will be focusing on medical electricity as a case study in scientific knowledge construction and what this meant for the subjects of said treatment and their identities.
Broadly speaking, she is interested in analysing the categories of health and illness and their political implications. Her Master’s thesis argued that hygiene, on a societal level, can be used as a tool of oppression because it is a form of ideology, connected to eugenics. The thesis as well as her previous studies focused on Michel Foucault, critical theory, particularly on the works of Theodor Adorno, and Continental political theory at large. She is also a visual artist whose artistic work is focused on the arbitrary nature of scientific concepts. Studies (HCAS).
Email me: edna.huotari@helsinki.fi
MA Lotta Vuorio
Project Coordinator
MA Lotta Vuorio is a PhD researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD project, Moving Bodies – Materiality, Senses, and Exercising in the Late Nineteenth-Century England (2020–2024), examines the embodied experiences of exercising and moving one’s body in the Victorian era. She is the producer of a Finnish, history-themed podcast called Menneisyyden Jäljillä (On the track of the past), and is interested in the way historical knowledge is represented and popularised.
Email me: elbowresearch@gmail.com
Elbow 