When, at our meeting in Slovenia in September last year, our Finnish colleagues Päivi Lappalainen and Viola Parente-Capková mentioned the possibility of our coming to Finland for the Conference “On the Move: Real and Imaginary Spaces, Borders and Transitions in the Nineteenth Century”, organized at Tampereen yliopisto (the University of Tampere), Finland, in January 2015, I was more than a little enthusiastic. Not only did the theme of the conference seem to really complement the objectives of our project, but to visit the land of the Moomins, and to test theory that Moomintroll looks a lot like my brother, had been a strange little ambition of mine for quite some time.  I was not quite as enthusiastic, however, about the possibility of it being -20°c…

            In the event, it wasn’t quite as cold as we’d thought, and Suzan van Dijk and I arrived in Helsinki in gentle snow, to a pretty, white landscape.  We spent one night in Helsinki, preparing and discussing our papers, and then travelled by train to Tampere the next day.  We arrived at the university just as the conference was beginning, and joined the English-speaking sessions.  While not all the panels were in English, those that were seemed to suit our research interests (mine especially) enormously, and we listened with avid interest to papers such as Reeta Eiranen’s “Gendered Spheres and Activities in a 19th-century Family Network”, Continue reading →