Keynote speakers

Professor Stefan Berger
Institute for Social Movements, University of Bochum
Experiences of deindustrialization and the role of memory in forging futures for places undergoing structural economic change: global perspectives
Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum. He is also executive chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr, and a Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. Before taking up his current position in Germany, he was Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the University of Manchester (2005 – 2011), Professor of Contemporary History and Director of the Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan (2000 – 2005), Senior Lecturer in German Studies at Cardiff University (1991 – 2000) and Lecturer in British Social History at the University of Plymouth (1990/91). Between 1987 and 1990 he was a German Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he completed his PhD in 1991. Before taking up his scholarship he studied history, political science and German literature at the University of Cologne (1985-1987).

Dr Karen McCluskey
The University of Notre Dame Australia
Art and experience: aesthesis, intellect and the question of relationality
Karen is an art historian of the European Middle Ages, with a particular research focus on the intersection of art, faith, and experience. Karen teaches history at the University of Notre Dame Australia in Sydney and is a fellow of the Research Council of Finland’s Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Sydney in 2006. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from Queen’s University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from McMaster University, both in Ontario, Canada. She is currently editing a volume called ‘Art and Lived Religion,’ with Prof Raisa Toivo, which examines the possibilities of art history and lived religion as complimentary methodologies. Her first monograph ‘New Saints in Late-Mediaeval Venice, 1200-1500: a typological study’ was published by Routledge in 2020 and a chapter on perceptions of impairment in the painted biographies of Fina of San Gimignano was recently included in the ‘Routledge Companion to Art and Disability’ (2022).

Dr Ville Kivimäki
The Finnish Literature Society
Experiences in history: some risky roads that could lead to interesting places but could also turn out to be dead-ends or even dangerous alleys where you are robbed of your academic credibility and laughed at
Dr Ville Kivimäki is the Research Director of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki. As a social and cultural historian, he has specialised in the history of the Second World War and the war’s individual, cultural and societal consequences. In this work, Kivimäki has combined histories of experience and emotions with memory and trauma studies. In 2018–23, Kivimäki led the “Lived Nation” research team at the Research Council of Finland’s Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX). As a nationalism scholar, he is interested in the history of feeling and experiencing the nation and in the post-Second World War nationalism. Besides his work at the Finnish Literature Society, Kivimäki is leading the Research Council of Finland research project “Unequal War: Vulnerability, Stress and Survival in the Finnish Army during World War II” at Tampere University.
Image by SKS/Emma Suominen