Meet the Estonian Studies teaching staff
Piret Viires is the Professor of Estonian Literature and Literary Theory at Tallinn University. She received her doctorate degree in Estonian Literature in 2006 from Tartu University. She has published books on Estonian Literature and postmodernism. The most recently published is Postmodernism in Estonian Literary Culture (2012, Peter Lang Verlag). In addition, she has published many articles, edited scholarly publications, organised conferences. She is a member of various scholarly organisations and editing boards. Her teaching assignments and research have taken her to the University of Turku (Finland), Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary), Ohio State University (USA). Piret Viires is a member of the board of the Estonian Writers' Union and has published fiction.
Main research interests: Modern Estonian Literature, postmodernism and post-postmodernism, relationships between literature and technology, digital literature.
Anna Verschik is the Professor of General Linguistics at Tallinn University. Her scholarly interests include topics like Estonian-Russian language contacts, multilingualism on the internet, sociolinguistics in the Baltic countries, contacts of Yiddish in the Baltic area and sociolinguistic situation of post-Soviet countries in a comparative perspective. She teaches subjects related to her research field.
Main research interests: contact linguistics and multilingualism.
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Kristjan Haljak is a lecturer in Estonian literature at Tallinn University. He is also an Estonian poet, translator and literary scholar, and the editor-in-chief of EstLit, a magazine dedicated to Estonian literature in translation. He holds a PhD from Tallinn University, where his doctoral research focused on Jaan Oks, Lautréamont and the revolution of poetic language. His research interests include modernism, the avant-garde, surrealism and psychoanalysis.
Haljak has published seven collections of poetry, including Palavik (2014), Verlaine'i revolver (2018), Illuminatsioonid (2020), Warszawa Centralna (2021) and Elektra Domina (2023), as well as the experimental novel Relvad naistele (2025). He has also translated major works from French, including texts by Charles Baudelaire, André Breton and Lautréamont. His writing and translations have appeared in several leading Estonian literary journals.
Marek Tamm is the Full Professor of Cultural History at the School of Humanities in Tallinn University and member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and of Academia Europaea. His research interest are at the intersection of cultural history of medieval Europe (incl. Livonia), cultural memory studies, historical theory and digital humanities (esp. digital medieval studies). He is currently Head of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Art History at Tallinn University, Chair of the Estonian Doctoral School of Arts and Humanities, and Vice-President of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. Graduated in history and semiotics at the University of Tartu (1998), he earned his master degree in medieval studies from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1999) and his doctorate degree in medieval history from Tallinn University (2009). Author of over five books, of some seventy scholarly articles published in Estonian, English and French, and editor of dozen collections of articles.
Main research interests: cultural history of medieval Europe, Estonian historical culture, theory and history of historiography, and cultural memory studies.
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Karsten Brüggemann is the Professor of Estonian and General History at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University. He received his PhD in history from the University of Hamburg in 1999 with a study of the Russian Civil War in the Baltic region: Die Gründung der Republik Estland und das Ende des ‚Einen und Unteilbaren Rußland‘ (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002). In 2013, he defended his habilitation at the University of Gießen with a study on the perception of the Baltic provinces in Russian imperial culture that is scheduled to be published in 2017 under the title Licht und Luft des Imperiums. Legimitations- und Repräsentationsstrategien russischer Herrschaft in den Ostseeprovinzen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz). He is the author of an analysis of musical mass culture in the USSR in the 1930s, Von Krieg zu Krieg, von Sieg zu Sieg (Hamburg: Kovač, 2002), a history of Tallinn, co-authored with Ralph Tuchtenhagen (Tallinn. Eine kleine Geschichte, Köln: Böhlau, 2011; in Estonian published as Tallinna ajalugu, Tallinn: Varrak, 2013) and numerous articles on Baltic and Russian history. Together with Ralph Tuchtenhagen he is the editor of a three-volume history of the Baltic States. He is co-editor (with Mati Laur) of the journal Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte and member of the editorial board of Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung. Since 2011 he serves as Vice President of Baltische Historische Kommission.
Main research interests: connected with Russian and Soviet history include the history of the Baltic States, civil wars and wars of independence, the cultural history of Stalinism and Late Socialism, national narratives and memory cultures as well as the history of sport and tourism.
Kristo Nurmis is a historian and a research fellow at the Tallinn University School of Humanities. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in the field of Russian and Eastern European History (2022). Kristo is currently working on a book project exploring the politics of legitimacy and mass influence in the Soviet and Nazi occupied Baltic States from 1939-53
Tõnis Saarts is the Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Tallinn University. He has a background in both political science and sociology. He has focused on comparative politics, political sociology, and historical sociology. More specifically, his research interests have concentrated primarily on political parties, party systems, social cleavages and the multiple challenges contemporary political parties have in modern democracies (the rise of populism, party system cartelization, etc.). He has also been interested in democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, where he has primarily focused on the Baltic States in a comparative perspective. His great passion has been historical sociology, in which he has studied the formation of modern democracy and statehood from a historical perspective. Saarts has also been active in the public sphere, in which he has written numerous media articles and provided media commentaries on the developments in Estonian politics for many well-known international media outlets.
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Joosep Susi is a visiting lecturer of literature didactics and estonian literature. His scholarly interests include poetry, poetry pedagogy, and the analysis of literary works as coherent wholes. He researches lyrical poetry and has pursued doctoral studies in literary theory at the University of Tartu. Susi is also a recognised literary critic, journalist, and promoter of contemporary literature.
Miriam Anne McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov has an MA in Romance Studies and Translation Studies and a PhD in Studies of Culture (Tallinn University, 2021). Her PhD thesis researched the poetics of translation in order to describe and conceptualise an approach to translating poetry that locates both poet’s and translator’s processes on the same continuum of creative activity. Her scholarly interests fall within the field of cultural studies, spanning English-language literatures, translation theory and practice, poetry and oral poetics, cognitive literary studies, and theories of creativity. Her teaching experience includes Literary Analysis, Comparative Poetry, Irish Literature and Culture, and Academic Writing. She has trained literary translators (for the Estonian Literature Centre) and Cambridge Assessment speaking examiners. She translates Estonian poetry for publication and performance. She is a member of the Estonian Writers' Union and the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature.
Lauri Linask teaches theory of culture, semiotics, and other related areas. His research interests include the theory of semiotics, culture and cognition, and the formation of their interrelations in children from a semiotic point of view. He is also interested in various relationships between culture, meaning and nature, within which culture is situated and tied.