In the autumn 2023 Riikka visited our project collaborators in Reykjavik and in Copenhagen. Her two-week visit at the Research Center for Disability Studies at the University of Iceland included meetings with scholars doing amazing and important research on disability studies and disability history. You can read more about their work, for example, from Understanding Disability Throughout History Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Iceland from Settlement to 1936 (Routledge 2022), edited by Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and James G. Rice. The book is also available Open Access. During her visit, Riikka also taught an ‘Intensive Course in Disability Studies: Disability in late medieval and early modern history’ (2 ECTS) with Professor Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and Postdoctoral Fellow Yoav Tirosh and presented at the conference Ráðstefna Þjóðarspegilsins.
Riikka continued collaboration with the Managing Melancholy (MM) – Dynamics of Theology and Medicine in 18th-century Denmark-Norway -project based at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. Earlier, this cooperation has included organizing and presenting in several joint sessions at international conferences and a guest lecture at the MM-project seminar. This autumn Riikka participated in the three-day seminar ‘Managing Melancholy – Dynamics between theology, medicine and law in the 18th century with a focus on the Nordic countries’, presenting on how melancholic persons were treated, also by spiritual means, in early modern Sweden.
News image credits: Iceland, from the NASA Visible Earth image gallery. Jeff Schmaltz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iceland_satellite.jpg
