Participant Info

First Name
Samira
Last Name
Saramo
Country
Finland
State
Affiliation
Migration Institute of Finland
Website URL
https://siirtolaisuusinstituutti.fi/en/person/samira-saramo/
Keywords
History of Death and Mourning, History of Everyday Life, History of Migration & Ethnicity, Canadian History, Finnish Migrations, Life Writing, Early North American Socialisms; Historical Methodologies
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a Kone Foundation Senior Researcher working at the Migration Institute of Finland. Currently, I am examining the ways Finnish individuals and communities have drawn on place, landscape, and emotion to claim belonging in Canada, allowing me to situate Finnish migration in the context of settler colonialism.

I was previously an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turku’s John Morton Center for North American Studies. My postdoctoral project explored Finnish immigrants’ personal narrations and everyday experiences with death and mourning in Canada and the United States in the years 1860–1939.

More broadly, I’m interested in life writing, migration, emotion, the everyday, place-making, and social movements. Most often, my work centers on histories of Finnish migrants in Canada and the United States, as well as in Soviet Karelia. I completed a PhD in History at York University (Canada) in 2014.

 

Recent Publications

“Capitalism as Death: Loss of Life and the Finnish Migrant Left in the Early Twentieth Century.” Journal of Social History. Advance Article online, August 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab039

“Archives of Place, Feeling, and Time: Immersive Historical Field Research in the (Finnish) U.S. Midwest.” Qualitative Research. Online First, July 2021. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941211033086

Samira Saramo and Marta-Laura Cenedese, co-editors. Connective Histories of Death, Special Issue of Thanatos, 2/2020. https://thanatos-journal.com/2020/12/31/thanatos-vol-9-2-2020-connective-histories-of-death/

“Making Transnational Death Familiar.” Samira Saramo, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, and Hanna Snellman (eds.), Transnational Death. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2019: 1–16. https://oa.finlit.fi/site/books/e/10.21435/sfe.17/

“‘I have such sad news’: Loss in Finnish North American Letters.” European Journal of Life Writing, 7 (2018): 53-71. http://ejlw.eu/article/view/235

“Terveisiä:  A Century of Finnish Immigrant Letters.” In Hard Work Conquers All: The Finnish Experience in Canada, edited by Michel Beaulieu, Ronald Harpelle, and David Ratz, 165–184.  Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press, 2018.

“Lakes, Rock, Forest:  Placing Finnish Immigrant History,” Journal of Finnish Studies, 20, 2 (December 2017): 55–76.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Canada, United States, Finland, Russia
Expertise by Geography
North America, Scandinavia
Expertise by Chronology
20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
Family, Local & Regional, Migration & Immigration, Rebellion & Revolution