Hanna Meretoja is a literary scholar, narrative theorist, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory (University of Turku). Her research is mainly in the fields of literature and philosophy, critical theory, narrative studies, cultural memory studies, and trauma studies. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford University Press) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014, Palgrave Macmillan). In her novel Elotulet (The Night of Ancient Lights), she partly draws on her research on the friction between life and narrative, on the narrativization of illness and trauma, and on water in literature.

Research

Meretoja is interested in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and history. She has contributed to developing narrative hermeneutics as a theoretical approach to narrative – as an approach that sees narrative in terms of culturally mediated interpretative practices that have existential relevance by shaping how we understand our being in the world and our possibilities of affect, thought, and action (see e.g. Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling, Oxford University Press, 2018). Her most recent research focuses on issues of narrative agency.

She runs a research project that is part of the Academy of Finland Consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and Story-Critical Narrative Theory” (2018–2023). Her earlier research projects include the EU project “#NeverAgain: Teaching Transmission of Trauma and Remembrance through Experiential Learning” (2018–2019) and “The Ethics of Storytelling and the Experience of History in Contemporary Arts” (Emil Aaltonen Foundation, 2013–2016).

Meretoja’s academic work has been published in such journals as New Literary History, Poetics Today, Memory Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Narrative Inquiry, Orbis Litterarum, and Storyworlds. She has co-edited The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (Oxford University Press, 2023, with Mark Freeman), “Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom” (Special Issue of Poetics Today, 2022, with Maria Mäkelä), “Cultural Memorial Forms” (Special Issue of Memory Studies, with Eneken Laanes), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (Routledge, 2020, with Colin Davis), and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (Routledge, 2018, with Colin Davis).

Her research is motivated by the belief that scholarship in the humanities shoud ultimately contribute to cultural self-understanding. It should help us understand the historical processes that underlie our current cultural situation, provide us with conceptual tools to analyse complex cultural phenomena, and expand our sense of the possible.

Bio

In 2001, Meretoja received her MA from the University of Turku, where she majored in comparative literature and minored in philosophy, art history, cultural history and communications. In 2010, she completed her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Turku (the title of her doctoral dissertation: The French Narrative Turn: From the Problematization of Narrative Subjectivity in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe to its Hermeneutic Rehabilitation in Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes).

Meretoja has served as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford (Exeter College and Oxford Centre for Life-Writing/Wolfson College, October 2019–May 2020; Exeter College, January–June 2023) and as a Visiting Professor at the American University of Paris (August 2013–July 2014). She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Tübingen (August 2002–July 2003), Sorbonne Nouvelle (February–June 2004), and Uppsala University (February–June 2008). Between 2013 and 2015, Meretoja worked as Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Tampere. She is the founding director of the research centre Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies (University of Tampere, director 2014–2015) and of the research centre SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory (University of Turku, director 2015–to date). Since August 2015, Meretoja has worked as a professor at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku. In August 2016, she was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature (permanent chair), and 2017–2019 she was Vice Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. She is currently the Head of ​Literary Studies and Creative Writing and the Chair of the University of Turku’s Thematic Collaboration Cultural Memory and Social Change. In 2020, she was awarded the life time membership of Academia Europaea.