Meet the Liberal Arts in Humanities teaching staff

is a Lecturer of Slavic and Russian studies. She received her PhD from Tallinn University's School in Humanities in 2022. She is currently working on her first monograph exploring the philosophical foundations and political resonance of women-authored historical fiction in interwar Europe. Among her scholarly interests are women's writing, gender history and history of knowledge in Eastern Europe, epistolarity, historical representation, and the French Revolution. Since 2019, she has been teaching seminars on literature, cultural theory, history, and basic academic skills.

(Tofantšuk) is the Professor of English at the School of Humanities at TLU. She has taught courses on literature and literary theory (World Literature, British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, 20th-21st-century British Literature, British Women Writers of the 20th-21st Century, 19th-century British Literature, 19th-century British Art, British and American Art in the 20th-21st Century, etc.), as well as practical English (English C2, Analysis of Academic Texts, Contemporary English, etc.), at BA, MA and PhD level. She has contributed to study programme development on all academic levels and is a member of several professional organisations (ESSE, FINSSE, MLA, ASLE, KAJAK, ENUT) and Advisory Board member of Lexington Books Ecocritical Theory and Practice series.

Julia Kuznetski’s PhD thesis (2007) was on construction of identity in the fiction of contemporary British women writers, for example, Eva Figes, Jeanette Winterson and Meera Syal. She has published articles, book chapters (Routledge, Peter Lang WV, Palgrave Macmillan) and delivered conference papers on gender and identity, transnational feminism, postcolonial and diaspora studies, ecocriticism and ecofeminism, which are her main research interests.

is the Professor of Estonian Literature and Literary Theory at Tallinn University. She received her doctorate on 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 has taken her to 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.

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.

is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Tallinn University. She earned her Ph.D. from Ca’ Foscari University in 2010 with a thesis on the early Chinese “sophistic” text Gongsun Longzi. She gained several years of research experience as a postdoc fellow at the University of Zurich, where she carried out an independent research project on argumentation and persuasion in early Chinese philosophical texts (2011–2016). She then collaborated with Wolfgang Behr on the research project “A Tangled Web of Sayings – Structural and phonological patterning in the Hanfeizi” (2016–2020), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In Zurich, she was also an active member of the interdisciplinary cluster University Research Priority Program “Asia and Europe” (2011–2014). Her research aims at providing a bridge between philosophy and philology, and focuses on Classical Chinese thought, literature, and culture in pre-imperial and early imperial China (Warring States and Han).

is a junior researcher in Cultural Studies who completed her MA in Literature, Visual Culture and Film Studies (Tallinn University). Iveta’s current research focuses on film analysis with application of such concepts as Becoming and Body without Organs in the context of popular Anglophone cinema. The aim of her research is to explore why elements of body horror genre become more relevant and widely used in modern cinema. Her analysis covers such topics as burnout society, auto-aggression, animalistic vulnerability, disgust and denial. Iveta’s teaching experience includes Anglophone Literature (Gothic, dystopian, metafictional, ecocritical), Environmental Humanities (Ecocriticism in literature, art and cinema), courses on Anglophone culture, literature and art (art movements, Nigerian history and cinema), Special course on literature and film (adaptation, intermediality, horror cinema).

“During our lectures I encourage students to express their opinions and engage in group discussions with their peers. It is always important for me to make the study process more interactive and creative”.

is a Junior Research Fellow in the field of History at Tallinn University. After graduating with a degree in Art History, Museology and Heritage Protection from Tartu University, she then continued her academic path in East European Studies at Free University of Berlin. She later returned to Berlin in order to conduct research at the Humboldt-University for her PhD thesis. Her doctoral dissertation is centered on the inner workings of the Soviet advertising industry. Thereby, she is focusing on the case study of a Soviet-Estonian bureau which produced advertising films for the whole Soviet Union.

Main research interests: contemporary history with special focus on the Soviet Union, history of marketing, commercial advertising and consumerism, organizational and business history, transitional societies and oral history.

poseesses a MA and PhD degrees from University of Tartu and has also studied at the Eötvös Lorand University Budapest, Hungary and at Universita degli studi di Firenze, Italy. Her research interests include linguistics, lexical semantics, semantic typology, color naming, categorization and perception, field linguistics, and psycholinguistics. She has published research articles on color semantics and categorization in a range of European languages including Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Finnish, Czech and others. She teaches psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics, semantics and pragmatics at Tallinn University. She supervises at BA, MA and PhD levels. She has also lectured in a number of European Universities in Roskilde, Verona, Milano, Budapest and others.

Helis Camara is an English teacher. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Culture from Tallinn University and a master’s degree in Foreign Language Teaching. Helis’s research interests include contemporary issues in English-speaking societies, professional vocabulary, and grammar. She has also taught courses in morphology, syntax, and phonetics, and in recent years has participated in delivering a course on culture and society.

Joonas Plaan is a lecturer of Anthropology. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he studied how climate change affects inshore fisheries in Newfoundland, Canada. Joonas has done fieldwork among the fishing communities and climate activists. Currently, he is also working for Estonian Fund for Nature (ELF) as a sustainable fisheries expert. He is also a board member of the Centre of Environmental History (KAJAK). Most importantly, Joonas sees himself as an environmental anthropologist, trying to understand human-environment interaction.

Research interests and areas: human-environment interactions, including environmental anthropology, political ecology, environmental history, landscape studies, environmentalism, fisheries, Baltic Sea and North-Atlantic fishing communities.

Read more about his
Listen to his CreativeMornings talk .

is the coordinator of the Audiovisual Ethnography track in Social Anthropology. His research focuses on developing audiovisual methods for anthropological inquiry, including producing and directing documentaries and sound works, as well as curating ethnographic film and sound programs in Europe and the Caribbean. Another strand of his research examines the complexities of Caribbean island life. His book Caribbean Island Movements: Culebra's Trans-insularities (2017) introduces the concept of “transinsularism” to engage with the contradictions of Caribbean island identities, based on a long-term relationship with the island of Culebra.

is a Junior Research Fellow with a background in English literature and creative writing. Her research focuses on contemporary life writing, particularly memoir, exploring how these texts reflect on and resist systemic violence, environmental degradation, power narratives, and collective memory, drawing on memory studies and eco-critical scholarship. Her interests extend beyond the Anglophone world, encompassing contemporary women’s literature from Latin America. She encourages students to be creative, share their genuine opinions, and develop original arguments when analyzing literary works. Her cross-cultural background inspires the exploration of literature beyond the traditional “canon,” uncovering diverse, non-Western perspectives and histories.

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.

is the Professor of German History and Culture in the Baltic Region – a professorship that was launched in 2012 by German State financing to ensure sustainable research on German heritage in the Baltics in the 21st century. Ulrike has Baltic German roots, she studied in Hamburg, Tartu and Greifswald and received her PhD from Mainz University. She has mainly dealt with 18th and 19th century studies, the history of Baltic German culture and literature, and, more recently, with environmental history looking at history from a transnational perspective.

Her recent research and teaching covers topics that bring local and global phenomena together – as for example in the Baltic German food history, Baltic climate and agrarian history, transnational and social history of the region.

graduated from the Tallinn Pedagogical Institute as a teacher of Russian language and literature with an additional specialty in pedagogy. Her academical activities at the university began in 1981. She defended her doctoral degree (PhD) at the Moscow Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Her main research interests are Russian as a foreign language, Russian language teaching methodology and subject-specific Russian. She has experience in teaching Russian in general and subject-specific language at university and for general public, level learning in all forms and levels (European Language level A1-C1). She speaks foreign languages, teaches foreign students and translates books. Jelena Raudla has special and methodological publications, has written 9 textbooks, participated at international conferences and belongs to professional organizations. She has organized and conducted training courses and participated in international projects.

is an anthropologist whose work focuses on diaspora, identity formation, and postcolonial theory in African and English-speaking contexts. Trained in cultural anthropology, his ongoing research examines the African diaspora in Estonia, with particular attention to identity, integration, contributions, and experiences of discrimination. One strand of his work explores how perceptions of Blackness and Africanness are constructed and negotiated within Estonian society. In his teaching, he values curiosity, openness, and critical thinking, fostering a classroom environment where every question is welcome and discussion is actively encouraged.