Publications

In Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America: Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces, eds. R. Andersson & J. Lahti, University of Helsinki Press, 2022.

By writing their stories of settlement in Canada and the United States over the decades, Finnish migrants and their descendants have claimed their place and belonging in these national histories. Through autobiographical and family history life writing, migrant-settler authors contribute personal narratives of migration, adversity, adventure, and (most often) positive integration that collectively build a rich view of Finnish lives and communities in North America. Through these texts, we are able to see some of the strategies and practices Finns have employed in establishing their North American migrant settlerhood.

University of Toronto Press, 2022.

In the early 1930s, approximately 6,500 Finns from Canada and the United States moved to Soviet Karelia, on the border of Finland, to build a Finnish workers’ society. They were recruited by the Soviet leadership for their North American mechanical and lumber expertise, their familiarity with the socialist cause, and their Finnish language and ethnicity. By 1936, however, Finnish culture and language came under attack and ethnic Finns became the region’s primary targets in the Stalinist Great Terror.

Building That Bright Future relies on the personal letters and memoirs of these Finnish migrants to build a history of everyday life during a transitional period for both North American socialism and Soviet policy. Highlighting the voices of men, women, and children, the book follows the migrants from North America to the Soviet Union, providing vivid descriptions of daily life. Samira Saramo brings readers into personal contact with Finnish North Americans and their complex and intimate negotiations of self and belonging.

Through letters and memoirs, Building That Bright Future explores the multiple strategies these migrants used to make sense of their rapidly shifting positions in the Soviet hierarchy and the relationships that rooted them to multiple places and times.

Journal of Social History, 2021.

In early twentieth-century Canada and the United States, Finnish migrants faced dangerous working conditions and regularly lost lives on the job. To counter government and company inaction, migrant workers supported each other through grassroots community systems of reciprocity and participation in unionism and socialism. This article pairs migrant labor history with the history of death and mourning to explore how the relationship between the two may mutually develop our understandings of everyday life. Three case studies are at the center of analysis: the Italian Hall Tragedy of 1913 (Calumet, Michigan), the Hollinger Gold Mine Disaster of 1928 (Timmins, Ontario), and the deaths of lumber union organizers Viljo Rosvall and Janne Voutilainen in 1929 (Thunder Bay District, Ontario). By focusing on the death, grief, and mourning at the core of these events and on the days immediately following the tragedies, I demonstrate that death and loss were central to Finnish migrant workers’ everyday encounters with community and class-consciousness. I analyze newspaper coverage of these deaths in order to investigate the strategies of the Finnish language socialist press and leadership to emphasize the deadly power of the capitalist socioeconomic structure, but also seek the everyday spaces, feelings, and relationships caught among labor tensions. In analyzing the cases, I aim to highlight opportunities for new types of dialogue on migrant social history that come from bringing together death, the everyday, and the political.

Qualitative Research, 2021.

In Summer 2018, I set out to find the feel of the places I have long studied as a historian, resulting in an expansion of my research process and ‘archive’. This article introduces and reflects on key moments and ideas from this research journey through historic strongholds of Finnish settlement in the U.S. Midwest. I discuss how following community leads and engaging with local knowledge-carriers made clear that my search for the past was intimately entangled with the present realities and future implications of demographic and economic change. I reflect on moments of being in place that allowed me to think through the inter-workings of historical memory and sensory imagination. This resulted in the integration of a photographic practice that serves as both a source and a tool for (re-)articulating feelings of particular moments in the field. I conclude by analyzing the fluid and multiple processes at play in the creation of research and archives. As a whole, this exploration aims to further embolden qualitative researchers to engage in sensitive research that makes space for feeling – both through emotions and senses – the productive and powerful pulls of time and place operating within our sites of research.

Special Issue of Thanatos, 2020 (9, 2). Co-editted with Marta Laura Cenedese.

Instead of being a collection of comparative history, this special issue is about connective histories, looking at what types of connections, overlaps, and disparities may arise when historical studies of death across places and centuries are brought together.

In the first article Povilas Dikavičius studies funeral processions in 17th century Vilnius, Lithuania and demonstrates how deathscapes play integral roles in the negotiation of community, belonging, and the making of the polis.

Arnar Árnason and Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson’s article studies how the specific and local geographical site of the “late” Icelandic glacier Ok expanded to become a multi-sited deathscape of global significance, reading its story through the lens of “ecological grief,” or the emotional response to the destruction caused by climate change.

In the third article Gian Luca Amadei connects the close links between new technologies for disposing of the dead and the rapid development of the urban techne in early twentieth century London through an analysis of the very personal and emotional correspondence of George Bernard Shaw.

David Harrap and Emily Collins’s contribution suggests, through a study of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English ars moriendi literature, that a two-part ars moriendi framework for the spiritual side of hospice care, which first tackles the dying person’s fear of death and then moving on to their (religious) preparation for death, may hold a key to facilitating and supporting “dying free” and “dying well” today.

In the fifth article Jacqueline Holler studies the emotions around death and dying and the ars moriendi in Early Colonial New Spain. Though European and Spanish ideals of “dying well” (buen morir) had been integrated into colonial life in Mexico by 1600, ordinary people and even clergy resisted the hegemonic conventions of the artes, and turned to their own strategies and emotions to confront death. By utilizing Inquisition documents and the remarkable autobiographical account of the mystic Madre María Magdalena, Holler successfully brings to view deaths and individuals that we rarely gain access to and highlights a unique Mexican culture of death that predated and looked rather different than the modern image of the Day of the Dead.

The concluding piece is a poetic intervention by writer and poet Immanuel Mifsud. After a brief situating note by Mifsud, readers are given the opportunity to engage with the thoughts of Leli, a dying man—as envisioned by the poet—in both the original Maltese and the translated English. The poem allows us to explore how the feelings, memories, and places of life, dying, and death may be conveyed differently through poetic language and hendecasyllabic meter.

European Journal of Life Writing, 2018.

Life writing has been an important tool for people to work through loss in their lives. In the context of twentieth-century migration, word of death and shared mourning occurred primarily through letters in the international post. Focusing on letters written by Finnish immigrants in the United States and Canada from the 1940s–1960s, this article analyzes some of the ways that letter writing has been used to address death and loss. Positioning personal letters within the broader field of life writing, this work examines how both loss and life writing often trigger a re/defining of the self, addressed in multiple and ambiguous ways by individual mourner/writers. In its unsettling of life, feelings, and connections, loss is a rupture of the self. By narrating their life, writers create personal chronologies, position themselves in places and communities, and declare their values. The life writing of Finnish North Americans provides windows into the difficult work of trying to assign meaning to meaning-defying loss.

In Transnational Death. Edited by Samira Saramo, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, and Hanna Snellman. Finnish Literature Society, 2019.

In Hard Work Conquers All: Building the Finnish Community in Canada. Edited by Michel S. Beaulieu, David K. Ratz, and Ronald N. Harpelle.
UBC Press, 2018.

Journal of Finnish Studies, 2017 (Vol. 20, Issue 2, 55-76).

This article examines uses of landscape in Finnish Canadian autobiographical writing. By framing relationships between people and landscapes as dynamic and interactive, this analysis inquires about the persistence of the Finnish Canadian "landscape myth"--that Finns settled there because of the landscape. These life writing narratives are situated within the traditions of Finnish nationalism, Finnish and Canadian settler narratives, and Finnish immigration historiography, yet are viewed as examples of the diverse ways that individuals use, understand, and represent their connections with place and landscape. The article analyzes Nelma Sillanpää's Under the Northern Lights (1994) and Aili Grönlund Schneider's The Finnish Baker's Daughters (1986), further contextualized by additional Finnish Canadian autobiographical works. Though focused on Finnish experiences in Canada, this work contributes to broader discourses on Finnish Great Lakes identities.

Histoire sociale/ Social History, 46, 92 (November 2013).

The letters of seven Finnish North American immigrants in Soviet Karelia, written between 1931 and 1942, and those of two correspondents writing retrospectively about their experiences between 1972 and 1997 introduce readers to unique voices from inside Stalin’s Russia. The letters speak to both collective experiences and personal negotiations of place and self. They shed light on two aspects often overlooked by other sources: youth culture and the transnational flow of everyday items. The Finnish Canadian and American letter writers also offer historians an opportunity to explore individual responses to migration, political repression, and difficult pasts. Looking at the ways in which the writers invoked memories of North America, their experiences of the Great Terror and Finnish Continuation War, and freshly recollected memories of daily life provides glimpses of their fluid sense of self. Reading the letters in light of the silences – what is not said – begins to unravel the writers’ understanding of their “truths.”