In the latest episode of the University of Press podcast, The UPside, we sat down (virtually) with Editors Dr. Thomas A. DuBois and Dr. Anne Mäntynen to discuss the Journal of Finnish Studies. You can listen to the podcast here or read below for a transcript of the conversation.
University of Illinois Press: Welcome to the University of Illinois Press podcast, The UPside. I’m Mary Warner, the Journals Marketing Assistant for the Press, and today I’m excited to present our podcast highlighting Journal of Finnish Studies, just in time for Finland’s Independence Day on December 6th. I’m joined today by the journal’s co-editors Thomas A. DuBois and Anne Mäntynen. It’s great to have you both here! Could you please introduce yourselves to the listeners and give us a bit about your background?
Thomas A. DuBois: I’ll start. My name is Tom Dubois. I’m the Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Studies, Folklore, and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and I’m also really honored to be a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Anne Mäntynen: I’m Anne Mäntynen, and I work at the University of Helsinki as a professor of nonfiction in the Finnish language department. My background is in Finnish language studies. I’ve also worked at the University of Jyväskylä, the University of Tampere, and at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) in Budapest, Hungary. So, that’s my background, briefly.
UIP: Great, thank you both so much again, and welcome to The UPside.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with the journal, the Journal of Finnish Studies, founded in 1997, is an international, scholarly, interdisciplinary journal that brings research about Finnish topics to an English-language audience. The Journal aims to foster a deeper understanding of the rich cultural, historical, social and political heritage of the lands and people that make up the Republic of Finland today, along with Finland’s global impact and relations with other parts of the world, including the wider Nordic region and North America. The Journal welcomes research articles that delve into Finnish culture, history, politics, economy, education, arts, literature, linguistics, folklore, migration, and related subjects and also publishes book reviews of titles relevant to the field of Finnish studies, including works published in Finland. You can learn more about the Journal, including how to subscribe, submit your own work, or read online, at go.illinois.edu/JFS.
Now that we all know a little bit more about the Journal, let’s get into some more questions. First of all, we wanted to speak with you both now as a part of UIP’s celebration of Finland’s Independence Day. For any listeners who may not be familiar with Finnish history, can you give us a brief overview of the history behind the holiday?
AM: Finland became independent in 1917 after being first part of the Swedish Empire and then under the Russian regime. And before that, Finland was an integral part of Sweden from the Middle Ages. So, it’s a quite young state, and independence means a lot in Finland, and for Finns. I think that’s the brief history.
TD: I might add that among in the U.S., with a lot of Finnish Americans, when they think about the heritage, it often kind of migrates to Christmas and Juhannus, and those days get really celebrated, although there often are also Independence Day events in the United States as well, because it’s really an important holiday.
UIP: So, to all of our Finnish-speaking listeners…
AM: Hyvää itsenäisyyspäivää!
TD: Happy Independence Day!
UIP: I also wanted to make sure that I mention a past special issue of Journal of Finnish Studies, Volume 21, Issue 1-2, entitled “The Making of Finland: The Era of the Grand Duchy” which has a lot of interesting scholarship about the origins of Finnish national identity and Finland’s time as a part of Russia. It would be a great resource for anyone interested in the topic and is just one of many great special issues in the Journal of Finnish Studies.
Recently, there were two back-to-back themed issues published on the topic of “Multilingual Finland” (part 1 is Vol. 27, Iss. 2 and part 2 is Vol. 28, Iss. 1). Could you tell us about how those came to be, why they were a good fit for the journal, and what readers could expect out of those special issues?
TD: Those two issues are wonderful contributions by one of the former co-editors of the Journal, Helena Halmari at Sam Houston University, and the current book editor of the journal, Lotta Weckström at Berkeley. They’re both linguists, and they wanted to do a set of special issues that would really highlight the linguistic diversity of Finland. That means not just looking at Finnish and Swedish, which are of course national languages for the country, but also long-standing minority languages and languages of particular communities within Finland, like Sámi and Romani, and the two different signed languages that are used by Deaf people and their families. And then also the languages of more recent arrivals and the languages of neighboring countries that have migrants into Finland, like Russian and Estonian and increasingly Ukrainian. So, they really wanted to give a snapshot of that complexity. And one of the articles is on English as well, so it has a really broad base, and I think it’s going to be a really fascinating read for a lot of people. From the point of view of language studies, as Anne can comment on more, that kind of look at Finland’s linguistic complexity is really important.
AM: Yes, absolutely. Just like Tom said, I’ve found these special issues highly interesting. They, from the outside, present very well the current linguistic situation in Finland, which is very multilingual. There are many perspectives in those special issues, so I think it’s a success. Very, very good issues.
UIP: So interesting, before those issues, I never knew there were so many languages in Finland. While we’re on the topic, I’m curious if there are any other standout past special issues that you would like to take a second to highlight—hard to choose, since there are so many, but maybe just one or two that come to mind.
TD: I would mention that Vol. 26, Iss. 2, was a special issue on Swedish language and culture in Finland, and in that one there are some great articles about life on Åland, the autonomous Swedish-speaking region in the Baltic. And also, just really wonderful ones on the status of Swedish as a literary language, as a cultural language, and as a political language, so that’s a really cool one. And we have, coming up, kind of a repeat: every so often we have an issue on Kalevala, and we have one coming up and it’s kind of like that generation’s take on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, and so that’s something to look forward to.
UIP: Those sound fascinating! Moving away from special issues, I want to ask a bit more about the direction of the Journal itself. In the description online, you specifically welcome articles on Finnish migration to and from North America. Can you speak to why you felt this was important to clarify and how migration to/from North America specifically has impacted Finland or Finnish Studies as a field?
TD: Well, I can start on it and say that in 1997, when the journal was founded, Börje Vähämäki was the professor at the University of Toronto in Canada. It was really important to Börje and to the community that he was working on. He was fundraising for the Finnish studies professorship at that university. It was important to signal not just the research about and in Finland, but also the story of migration to North America, which was huge for Finnish society.
There’s virtually no one in Finland who doesn’t have a relative some time back who moved to the United States or Canada, or who came back from North America over time. So, it had a tremendous effect on Finnish life in many ways. The Journal of Finnish Studies, being in North America, it made a lot of sense to include that as an area of research. Migration has been a really big topic in Finland more generally since then, and Anne can speak better about that, but I think the North American example is a really interesting comparison to the migration that is happening nowadays in Finland.
AM: Yes, I think it’s relevant today, and there is research being done on US–Finland migration still. For example, we have researchers working on private letters that migrants—Finns who had moved to the U.S. or Canada—wrote to their relatives in Finland. And this is a new kind of data that is very popular. There will be very interesting results on that. You know, people who couldn’t write properly and they still wrote those letters. So, that’s something I’m looking forward to, if we can have those articles in the Journal.
UIP: That would be a great addition to the Journal in the future.
In terms of discipline, the Journal of Finnish Studies also has such a broad scope, covering history, anthropology, folklore, literature, linguistics, political science, sociology, business, and more. I’m curious if the Journal has always been so interdisciplinary since its inaugural issue in 1997 or if it has broadened over time, and if Finnish Studies as a field of study has always been interdisciplinary?
AM: I don’t know the history so well. It’s a bit tricky, because I just started as co-editor, but it seems to me that the scope may have slightly broadened over time. Just like research has. Research on Finland and in Finnish Studies has broadened and become more and more interdisciplinary. Nowadays researchers in Finland, and I think in the U.S. also, cooperate more with people from other disciplines, and that can be seen in the publications as well. I think more in the future, even. So, it has broadened, I’d say. What do you think, Tom?
TD: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think in the context of the United States, if you think about Börje when he started the Journal, or Helena at Sam Houston University, or me at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, you often are the one professor of Finnish or Finnish Studies at a university. And so, any question that comes up—about birth rates in Finland, about the politics of NATO, anything that arises—you get the calls from newspapers. Something about being that lone voice shaped the Journal in the past. I think what’s exciting now is just to see how many ways we have this international Finnish scholarly input and shaping of the Journal, and scholars using that as a place for publish their work for an international audience.
UIP: I think this is the last of the more historical questions, but speaking of the history of the Journal, it is also nearing its thirtieth volume year, which is so exciting! Looking back over the last almost three decades, are there any major milestones, transitions, or landmark moments in the journal’s history that stand out for you as particularly impactful?
TD: Well, as the historian, Börje Vähämäki did tremendous work over the years, and there have been various great editors, but I think Helena Halmari and Hanna Snellman were a fantastic team. They created the notion of there should be a North American–based and a Finland-based co-editor arrangement, because it can really serve the Journal in great ways. And they did just wonderful work over time.
I’m talking to the University of Illinois Press, but I would say that the 2022 bringing of the journal into the University of Illinois Press was super important. Because suddenly that made all kinds of things possible that had been much more difficult before. It used to be hard to pay for a subscription to the Journal with a credit card, because we didn’t have the capability of doing that. And nowadays, the Journal is so well-placed in terms of indexes and production of both the digital copy and hard copy. The mailing lists are really well done, and authors who want to do an open access version of their article, which is often very important in Finland, can arrange that with the Press for a reasonable fee. So, there’s wonderful things that came with that move to the University of Illinois Press.
UIP: Thank you, I swear we didn’t put that question in there just to get positive feedback, but that’s always nice to hear. There have also been more recent changes at the Journal. Anne, you just recently began your tenure as editor of the Journal while Tom, I believe you have been an editor since 2021. How has the experience of working as co-editors been so far? Have there been any particular highlights or challenges?
AM: Well, I’m very excited and very pleased about working with Tom as a co-editor, and being a co-editor of the Journal. I’m sort of waiting to get really into things. I think one of the most important aims, and maybe challenges, that we have is to modernize the review and editing processes now that we have the technology at the Press. And I do have experience using those. So, we are trying to make most of the Scholastica system, and help both writers and reviewers in their work, as well as ourselves, I think. But I’m really excited. I’m just waiting to get things rolling. That’s my view.
TD: I second that view. The framework we have through the Press is going to be great and will help, especially because we have such a huge time difference between where we are in the world. Being able to communicate and work through that platform will make our work much easier.
UIP: I guess you covered this a little bit, but outside of Scholastica, do you have any goals for the Journal under your editorships?
TD: I would say that a goal is to make this a go-to journal for Finnish scholars. In the Finnish system when you’re doing a project, it’s often important to have an international publication, something that reaches a broader audience, and this is a journal where you can write that article and assume a really knowledgeable audience that knows about Finland and is interested in the topic. A lot of times in an international journal, a writer has to start with “Where is Finland? Finland is a small country…” and so on and so forth. All of that can be just assumed in an article for the Journal of Finnish Studies and you can start at the base of introducing your topic and your research and your findings. And have that out for readers who speak Finnish, but also for international readers who do not and who are interested in the topic.
UIP: Okay, great. Are there any new themes, emerging trends, interdisciplinary work, or other types of articles that you hope to see submitted more often in the future?
AM: There are many themes popular, or trending, in Finland at the moment. I would like to see some of those in the Journal. For example, research on reading and literacy, as well as research on Finnish nonfiction. Being a professor of nonfiction, they are trends I’d like to see in submissions because there are many projects on reading, so that’s something that is interesting. Finland is known to be a country of readers.
I also hope to see more articles submitted by Finnish PhD students. I think that’s something we can work on. I’m trying to encourage PhD students to submit to the Journal.
TD: Those are both such wonderful areas. I’m thinking about that notion of reading because that has such implications for North America, where the reading rate has gone down and down and down and down. And it’s a real source of anxiety for a lot of American educators—how do we get people to read again? Understanding a society that has prized and encouraged and invested in reading as part of the culture, I think that’s going to have a lot of relevance for Americans, and broadly international scholarly readers as well.
UIP: I’m curious if you have any advice to scholars looking to get their work published in Journal of Finnish Studies. What makes a submission stand out? And also, you especially highlighted PhD students. If there is any specific advice for them as well, that’d be great to hear.
TD: I second what Anne said about how we really welcome those PhD student articles into the Journal. I always feel that a lot of times, earlier-career scholars are really worried about what they’re going to get as feedback and putting their stuff out is something that they’re a little bit anxious about, but the feedback that you get from a journal review is some of the most valuable input you can have on your work possible. It’s somebody who is taking the time to read your article and to give you feedback and ways to improve. Think about it as a dialogue and as a way in which we help each other do better work over time. A lot of times, an article can come back with a whole bunch of advice and maybe a decision that it can’t be published in its current form, but that’s great input to have and then you can work that through and resubmit it, either to the same journal or another one. It really helps people think through what they want to be saying in their scholarship. And that’s what it’s all about: scholarship is a conversation.
UIP: Great, thank you. Are there any articles that are going to be published in a future issue that you could give readers a preview of?
TD: There’s a super cool one coming in out Vol. 28, Iss. 2, by Taina Kinnunen and Päivi Korvajärvi. We talked about the North American migration, but they’re both feminist scholars looking at very recent high-skilled migrants to the Silicon Valley, particularly women. What happens when a woman who has a career in Finland and is part of a married couple comes to Silicon Valley and suddenly discovers a world in which the infrastructure to support dual-career couples is much more limited? They end up as stay-at-home moms trying to maintain a professional identity while also driving kids to and from the long distances that everything has because you have to drive everywhere in the U.S. instead of taking the bus or riding a bike. So that transformation and the issues that arise with it—it’s just a super fascinating look at these two societies that on a certain level can seem similar but are actually tremendously different in terms of what they do for the people who are a part of them.
UIP: Looking forward to reading that one! Before we wrap up, I’d love to give us some time to discuss your work outside of the Journal. You both have contributed so much to the field. I was wondering if each of you could briefly tell us about one of your past publications and tell us about the process of researching, writing, and publishing it.
AM: This is not actually a research paper, but my next publication will be in English. It’s a textbook on discourse analysis entitled Studying Language, Producing Knowledge: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, written together with Sari Pietikäinen. The writing process, of course the proposal first and then the writing process have been time-consuming and taken a couple of years, maybe three, due to other engagements and personal life issues and so on. But the book is now in the editing stage, and if all goes well it will be published in April 2026. I’m very proud of this; it will be published by Wiley. So, that’s my latest.
TD: That’s so cool! Textbooks take so much work to plan out, it’s amazing. All of those issues to deal with—you’re trying to describe a field but also guide a reader. Congratulations on that book, that’s super exciting.
AM: Thank you, thank you.
TD: The one that I might mention is also a coauthored book. Coppélie Cocq at the University of Umeå and I wrote a book called Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North. It’s about the way in which Sámi people use produced and also social media to advocate for a Sámi agenda—cultural preservation and cultural revitalization in their lives. It was a wonderful book to do because we got to do a lot of great interviews with different people and also lift up some super fascinating moments in Sámi media history: like there was a precursor to Facebook called SámiNet, which really had all the features of what would eventually become Facebook, but about ten years earlier. Everybody was online in the Sámi community much earlier than even at Harvard, where Facebook got started. So, it’s a fascinating historical question to understand how an Indigenous community in technologically advanced countries where Sámi people live, including of course Finland, has used those technologies to support their culture.
AM: That’s very interesting. Congratulations, Tom!
UIP: Both projects sound fantastic. Congratulations to you both. Before we go, is there any other information you’d like to share with our listeners about the Journal?
TD: Maybe Anne can speak to this, but we’re just encouraging not only authors to send us articles but also proposals for special issues like the ones we’ve had. We’re always open to those. Anne, you want to say anything on that?
AM: I would just second you but also add book reviews. We’d welcome book reviews on any publications that deal with Finland, Finnish issues, Sámi language, or Swedish. We’re waiting to have more submissions.
UIP: Hopefully more people submit those, and we get more interesting special issues from the journal in the future. I think that is wrapping everything up. Thank you both for joining the podcast today. We love having the Journal of Finnish Studies at the Press and it’s so great to talk to you both. And a big thank you to our listeners for tuning in to learn more about Journal of Finnish Studies.
To find out more about the journal, please visit go.illinos.edu/JFS and consider writing to your librarian to recommend that they subscribe. For further reading, the University of Illinois Press is also the publisher of other European Studies journals such as Diasporic Italy, Italian Americana, Italica, Polish American Studies, and The Polish Review. We have also recently published the book Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States, edited by Danielle Battisti and S. Deborah Kang. You can view all of those and more at press.uillinois.edu. Thank you.