Lotta Leiwo

Background

About Lotta Leiwo

Doctoral Researcher, MA in Folklore Studies (University of Helsinki) specialized in historical understandings of climate and weather, handwritten and historical newspapers from 1880s to 1920s, and Finnish socialist migrant-settlers in the United States. Research interests include: cultural history of climate, weather writing, Finnish-American culture, settler colonialism, and labour history. In my Master's thesis ”’Luontokin näkyy olevan köyhälistöä vastaan’ Luonto kolmantena tilana Toveritar-lehden paikkakuntakirjeissä 1916-1917” [”’Even the nature seems to be against the poor’ Nature as Thirdspace in newspaper Toveritar’s local letters 1916-1917”] I studied North American Finnish women’s and children’s spatiality, settler coloniality, and political rhetoric concerning nature. During my Master's studies in 2022-2023, I worked as the research assistant in the Kone Foundation funded project "T-Bone Slim and the transnational poetics of the migrant left in North America.” In addition to managing the research materials and organizing several events I worked closely with the international research team and was responsoble of constructing the T-Bone Slim corpus and database published in the Language Bank of Finland. Working with a large corpus gave me solid knowledge of managing large datasets for hybrid methods of close and distant reading.