Marina Grishakova
Professor
Marina Grishakova’s scholarly interests include theories and philosophy of literature, cognitive aesthetics, narratology, intermediality and interart studies, and the history of ideas and concepts in the humanities in the 20th century. Her current work focuses on complexity and theories of representation. She is also interested in the role of fiction and imagination as heuristic and exploratory tools. Among her recent publications are Intermediality and Storytelling (with M.-L. Ryan; De Gruyter, 2010); Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy (with S. Salupere; Routledge, 2015) Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution (with M. Poulaki; University of Nebraska Press, 2019). She has been, and is still, chair or member of the steering and advisory boards of many professional associations, journals and book series, and has given a multitude of guest lectures in various universities across Europe.
Jaak Tomberg
Researcher
Jaak Tomberg is an associate professor of contemporary literature at the University of Tartu whose main areas of
research are philosophy of literature, poetics, science fiction, and literary utopias. He has a bachelor’s degree in Estonian literature (2002), and a master’s degree (2004) and PhD (2009) in comparative literature. He has published three monographs in Estonian: Extrapolative Poetics (2004) focuses on the poetics of cyberpunk, The Reconciliatory Purpose of Literature (2009) on the function of fiction in the field of tension between possibility and necessity, and How to Fulfil a Wish (2023) on the fate and status of realism, science fiction, and the utopian imagination in a technologically saturated, globalized cultural reality. Besides academic research, Tomberg has written a lot of award-winning literary criticism, organized a lot of literary events, edited the experimental avant-garde journal VIHIK, translated fiction, and written plays. In 2014, he was awarded the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for the best essay-length article of the year.
Francesca Arnavas
Research Fellow
Francesca is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Tartu. She works within the research group Narrative, Culture and Cognition. She has researched and published on fantasy fiction, Victorian literature, cognitive narratology, and literary Victorian and postmodern fairy tales. She is the author of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” and Cognitive Narratology: Author, Reader and Characters (De Gruyter, 2021) and Uncanny Fairy Tales: Hybrid Wonders in the Mirror (Routledge, 2024).
Indrek Ojam
Researcher
Indrek Ojam (PhD) is a researcher at The Estonian Cultural Arhive (Estonian Literary Museum) and at The University of Tartu (in the project “Experimental Cultures of the 1990s-2020s: Narratives, Models, and Epistemic Objects”). He has studied mostly Estonian literary modernism, especially the poetics of Madis Kõiv’s, Mati Unt’s and Ene Mihkelson’s works. His current interests include the poetic rendering of impersonal affect and the position of Eastern-European fiction in globally-oriented theories of world literature.
Silvia Kurr
Researcher
Silvia defended her doctoral dissertation titled Material Ekphrasis: Bringing Together New Materialisms and Ekphrastic Studies at the University of Tartu in September 2023. She holds a Master’s degree in Literature, Visual Culture and Film from Tallinn University and the Estonian Academy of Arts. Silvia has published on the intermedial relations between literature, painting, and film. Her research interests include intermedial studies, ekphrasis, new materialisms, and ecocriticism.
Mattia Bellini
Researcher
Dr. Mattia Bellini is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Technology of Compiègne, France, and Knowledge Transfer Project Manager at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He serves as a Board Member of the Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives and as Advisory Board Coordinator of the COST Action 24169 SiDnet. His research explores humanistic human-computer interaction, interactive digital narratives for social good, representation of complex heritage, and cognitive approaches to video game studies.
Paula Taberland
PhD Student
Paula completed her MA studies in World Literature at the University of Tartu in 2021. In her research, she explores melancholy mood and related feelings in works of literature and film to find out how we can better understand our relationship with ourselves, society, and the world at large. She is currently writing a thesis on the atmospheric markers of existential feelings in post- and metamodernist fiction.