I work as a Professor of Comparative European History, concentrating especially on the history of political and social discourse in the long term from comparative and transnational perspectives. I cooperate with political historians, political theorists and language policy researchers to produce multidisciplinary, comparative and transnational analyses of past political discourses and cultures in Finland, Sweden and major European powers. We are particularly interested in interrelationships between political discourse, political practice and action as well as in cross-national mobility and transfers. I wrote my dissertation (1999) on conceptualisations of political and religious pluralism in early 18th-century England. This brought me to work on the construction of national identities from the point of view of the secularization of nationalism for Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772 (2005). My early career projects gave rise to Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800 (2010). Whereas a visit to the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies helped me to complete editing Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution: Nordic Political Cultures, 1740-1820 (2011, with others), a research period at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies supported research Language Policies in Finland and Sweden: Interdisciplinary and Multi-sited Comparisons (2015, with others) and Parliament and Parliamentarism: Comparative History of a European Concept (2016, with others). I have also coordinated projects on the parliamentary control of foreign policy, internationalism and supranational organisations and written articles on language policies, history-politics and interaction between political and scientific discourses. My current work focuses on the ferment that the First World War and the Russian Revolution initiated in European political cultures and on transfers in political discourse between Britain, Germany, Russia, Sweden and Finland. I am also interested on crises of political legitimacy from comparative and transnational perspectives.

History and Ethnology,Comparative studies of political cultures