Susanne Dahlgren
Susanne Dahlgren started as the director of the Institute June 2023. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki and studied social anthropology in the University of Edinburgh, the London School of Economics (LSE) and Helsinki University. Her minors include art history, theoretical philosophy and live model drawing. Her studies focus on southern Yemen. Her PhD dissertation was published by Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY) in 2010 under the title Contesting Realities. The Public Sphere and Morality in Southern Yemen. That study focused on social dynamics in the city of Aden seen from the perspective of competing moral frameworks. The ethnographic study drew from discussions on moral propriety as present in Islamic and Western moral philosophy.
Her second research project took her to study the history of shari’a and fiqh and the court practice in Aden. Her next book project looks at court practice in Aden since the British colonial period until the current era from the angle of how shari’a has been interpreted and adjudicated with other legal systems throughout the modern era and how that has affected the lives of women and men and their children.
More recently, Susanne’s work focuses on state building and everyday state in Yemen during the modern era. By looking at both administration and governmentally as state acts towards the society she aims to show how modernity affects different social groups in varied ways which make “development” a highly contested issue, as present in the frontlines of the current war. Her work on making sense of the complexities of the Yemeni war has gained praise internationally.
Dahlgren is the past vice president of the Nordic Society for Middle East Studies (NSMES) and a current board member of the Association of the Middle East Anthropology (AMEA), an affiliate of MESA. She is the board member of the journal Hawwa and co-edits with Judith Tucker (Georgetown University) the book series Women and Gender: The Middle East and the Islamic World for Brill (Leiden). Susanne’s publications can be found here.
Nina Maaranen
FIME researcher Nina Maaranen, who started at the beginning of 2024, is an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East and a human osteologist, i.e. a bone researcher specializing in humans. Nina graduated with a PhD in 2020 from Bournemouth University, England. His dissertation, “Ties that bind: investigating Hyksos provenance and Migration using dental morphology”, focused on tracking migration during the Middle Bronze Age (around 2000–1500 BCE) in the Eastern Mediterranean region. During this period, urbanization, technological development and trade relations between regions were growing rapidly, which was also reflected in population structures – Nina’s current project also draws from these themes.
Nina’s research work takes place both in museum collections and in fieldwork. In the Middle East, he has participated in several excavations in Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, and through museum collections the research has also taken him to Syria, Jordan and Palestine. Through these different destinations, Nina collaborates with many international projects and researchers, and she actively participates in academic discussions at researcher meetings and as a member of expert organizations (e.g. BABAO). Nina’s previous publications can be seen here. Nina also worked for years as a member of the editorial board of the Finnish-language archaeological online publication Kalmistopiiri, currently as a guest writer. Nina is also part of the activities of the ARWA International archeology forum.
In FIME’s Postdoc research, Nina examines the health effects of urbanization in the ancient port city of Sidon in southern Lebanon during the Middle Bronze Age. The cemetery in Sidon, which has been in use for centuries, enables long-term monitoring of the local population as urbanization accelerates. Both traditional bone research (osteological) methods and biochemical analyzes are used as research tools, which make it possible to map the state of health both on an individual and population level. The research and its results will also be modified into a pedagogical form, which will bring out the diversity of the cultural heritage of the Eastern Mediterranean locally and internationally.
Sana Tannoury-Karam
Sana Tannoury-Karam is FIMEs resident scholar. Sana is an assistant professor of history in the Lebanese American University (LAU) and a historian of the modern Middle East and global history. She is working on the history of the political left, themes of internationalism and nationalism, the sociology of intellectuals, and the intellectual and social history of the Arab Middle East. Sana is also interested in themes of memory and forgetting, exile, and belonging.
Currently she is working on a book that chronicles the political organization and activism of a group of Arab Marxists who advocated for social justice, the international solidarity of the working class, the ills of capitalism, universal suffrage, and conjoining the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle.
Former researchers at the Institute
Samuli Lähteenaho
Samuli Lähteenaho’s doctoral thesis examines the coastline of Beirut and Lebanon from the perspective of environmental and urban politics. The research is based on long term participant observation with, for instance, civil society and volunteer organizations focused on environmental questions. Samuli’s work is guided by research interests in environmental politics and anthropology of space. In addition, he is interested in topics of diaspora and migration, as well as epistemological questions in the anthropology of politics.
Samuli’s latest publications are A line in the Sand: Colonial traces on Beirut’s Mediterranean Coastline, a chapter focused on land register, urban politics and relationality of space in an open access book Locating the Mediterranean published in 2022, as well as an essay on the invasive lionfish and environmental activism Fighting the Invasion from the Suez Canal: Coastal Environmentalism and Locating the Lionfish in Lebanon published in International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in 2023. Samuli’s publications can be accessed here.
Irina Piippo
Dr. Irina Piippo was the Director of the Finnish Institute in the Middle East 2020–2023. Irina’s fields of research include Arabic sociolinguistics and diasporic multilingualism. In recent years, she has focused on institutional multilingual language socialization of newly arrived students in the Finnish context. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork both in the context of integration training for adults and preparatory education in the Finnish comprehensive school.
Irina has published on Arabic sociolinguistics, sociolinguistic metatheory, multilingual language socialization and on the ways in which people construe language’s role in their social and cultural worlds. Language ideologies were also the topic of Irina’s book called Kielen taju [Sense of language] (2016) that she co-authored with Johanna Vaattovaara and Eero Voutilainen. Her dissertation Viewing norms dialogically (2012) is a study of language norms in sociolinguistic metatheory. The MIGDIA research project led by Piippo is focused on questions of migration, transnational educational paths and diasporic plurilingualism in Finland and Lebanon. Irina’s publications can be found here.
Taavi Sundell
FIME’s previous researcher and coordinator Taavi Sundell finished his doctoral research 2023 in world politics on the political economy of higher education in Jordan and Finland. Combining discourse theory and critical political economy, Taavi’s article-based dissertation examines how specific actors have articulated the border between public and private higher education and the underlying assumptions concerning the societal functions of universities and higher education.
Taavi’s latest article on the political economy of open access publishing Political Economy of Plan S: A Post-foundational Perspective on Open Access was published in Political Research Exchange in June 2021. The article can be accessed freely through the publisher’s website. Taavi’s other publications can be found here.
Sandra Nasser El-Dine
Sandra Nasser El-Dine worked as a researcher at FIME between 2021–2022. She is finishing her ethnographic PhD study that explores how young adults in urban Jordan experience romantic relationships and negotiate gender relations. Her research addresses practices of doing love and relational selving within everyday gender dynamics in intimate relationships. Sandra conducted the ethnographic fieldwork for her thesis between 2012 and 2016 among Jordanian and Syrian young adults who reside in Amman. During 2014, she was also a visiting fellow at the Finnish Institute in the Middle East as well as at the Columbia Global Centers in Amman.
Sandra’s post doc study concentrates on exploring how practices of relational care within displaced Syrian and Iraqi families are entangled with access to education in two very different contexts, in Finland and Lebanon. In addition to intimate relationships and local notions of love and care, Sandra’s research interests include Arab occidentalisms, Muslim subjectivities, and everyday re-definitions of Islamic traditions. She has published on these topics, as well as an article that addresses Arab masculinities. Sandra’s publications can be found here.
Raija Mattila
Dr. Raija Mattila was the Director of the Finnish Institute in the Middle East from 2014–2020. Raija’s research focuses on the Assyrian Empire, which ruled the Middle East during the 1st Millennium BC. Raija’s research interests include the administration of Assyria and its highest officials, Egyptians in Assyria and Babylonia as well as animals in Ancient Mesopotamia. Raija has published Neo-Assyrian administrative and private documents. Her doctoral dissertation The King’s Magnates (2000) studied the highest officials of the Assyrian Empire.
Raija is an Adjunct Professor (Docent) of Assyriology of the University of Helsinki and an associate member of the Centre of Excellence Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions. Before her position as the Director of FIME in Beirut, she has worked for the Intellectual Heritage of the Ancient Near project at the University of Helsinki, as a researcher at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, as the director of FIME in Damascus (2004–2008), as a researcher in the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies of the University of Helsinki, in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary at the University of Chicago in USA, as well as in the State Archives of Assyria project at the University of Helsinki.
Anu Leinonen
Anu Leinonen worked as a researcher at FIME 2019–2020. Her project investigated language policies and debates over those language policies in Turkey from 2011 onwards. Her research focused on how the arrival of 3,5 million Syrian refugees, and public services offered to them in Arabic, have influenced language policies and debates over them. Anu is especially interested the experiences of providing education in Arabic for the Syrian refugee children as well as the subsequent transition or integration of the Syrian children to Turkish-language public education from 2016 onwards.
In addition to nationalism, diversity, minority issues and language policy, her interests include media in Turkey, Turkey-EU relations and Ottoman history. She has followed Turkey from 1995 onwards and has lived in the country a total of five years. Anu works as Executive Officer of the Foundation for the Finnish Institute in the Middle East.
Päivi Miettunen
Päivi Miettunen worked as the Institute’s researcher and coordinator between 2017–2018. She conducted research on the role of information behaviour in the construction of social identities among both Bedouin and immigrant communities in the Middle East. In her dissertation she studied the effects of modernization on the religious and cultural identity of Southern Jordanian Bedouins. The case study focused on the holy sites of the region. In her field research she mapped and surveyed the sites, many of them uncharted until today. She also used participant observation and interviews to familiarize herself with local Bedouin culture, traditions and dialects.