Researchers

Tua Korhonen with Hippu

Dr. Tua Korhonen is Docent (Adjunct Professor) of Greek literature in the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has previously done research on the public image and self-concepts of Hellenistic philosophers and philosophical schools, environmental ethos in Plato’s Laws, several aspects  of the history of Greek rhetoric (like epideictic rhetoric),  and the so-called Humanist Greek texts in the Nordic countries (her PhD thesis). She has written also on Aristotle’s Poetics and ancient aesthetics, on the concept of animal lovers in Greek context, and on ancient vegetarianism. Her most recent contribution to Human-Animal Studies pertains to the sexual zoophilia in  Aelian’s  De Natura Animalium. More information about Korhonen’s publications, research and teaching activities  in the research database TUHAT and in the university homepage.

 

 

 

Erika Ruonakoski

Dr. Erika Ruonakoski has specialized in phenomenology of the body. Her research draws particularly from the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl and Simone de Beauvoir, whose works she has also translated into Finnish. Her doctoral dissertation Eläimen tuttuus ja vieraus (2011; The familiarity and foreignness of animals) dealt with the problem of empathising with non-human animals (see abstract). In the project Empathising with the Non-Human Other in Ancient Greek Literature she continued her research on intercorporeal and interspecies relationships, yet focusing this time on the ways they manifest themselves in the reading experience. In  her article Literature as a Means of Communication she combined two of her enthousiasms, analysing the Hellenistic woman poet Anyte’s  “bird epigram” with the help of Beauvoirian insights. In the monograph Human and Animal in Ancient Greek Literature (2017) co-authored with Korhonen, Ruonakoski discussed the reading experience of  ancient texts and wrote the case study of Anyte’s animal epigrams. Since this project, her research has expanded to include in-depth analyses of existentialist philosophies of nature, discussions of alienation and inclusion in learning philosophy and investigations into despair as a crisis of future-orientation. Ruonakoski obtained the title of Docent in Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä in 2017. More information about Ruonakoski’s publications and projects can be found in the research databases TUHAT, TUTKA and academia.edu. See also Ruonakoski’s personal info page at the University of Jyväskylä staff pages.