Leena Käosaar

Leena Käosaar is an Associate Professor of Cultural Theory at the Institute of Cultural Research at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Her research interests include the tradition of Estonian life writing and post-Soviet life writings, Baltic women’s deportation and Gulag narratives, women’s diaries and family correspondences, self-representational writing of traumatic experience, relationality, memory and mobility/the mobility of memory as well as creative nonfiction (life story writing) that she teaches at the University of Tartu alongside courses on literary and cultural theory, gender studies and Estonian literature. Since the spring of 2022, she has focused, within the framework of the project “Taking Shelter in Estonia: the Stories of Ukrainians Fleeing from the War,” on collecting the life stories of Ukrainian refugees in Estonia to support Ukrainian memory in the context of radical, often traumatic changes and mass migration caused by the military aggression of Russia on Ukraine.

 

At Yale, she will work on a monograph on Baltic women’s deportation narratives that is partially based on her previous research that has focused on strategies of representation of deportation experience in retrospective narratives and written records from the deportation period, based on published and manuscript sources. Her research in the field has been published in The Journal of Baltic Studies, Prose Studies, Life Writing, and in several edited volumes and handbooks, most recently in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020) and The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life (Indiana UP, 2020) During her fellowship period, she will focus on questions of the interrelationship of trauma theory and transnational and transcultural memory theories within the larger context of (Post)Soviet and (Post)communist memory and the co-existence of national and transnational frames of remembrance on the complex scale of alignment and contradiction.