Viliina Silvonen

Viliina Silvonen is an ethnomusicologically oriented folklorist specializing in Karelian lament tradition and its sprouts in Finland. Her research includes themes like performance and poetics, emotions and affective power of lamenting, as well as historical and cultural meanings. She is interested in tradition in changing sociocultural contexts, and the postcolonial discourse and minority perspectives linked to the lament tradition in contemporary Finland. Affiliated as a postdoctoral researcher at the UEF Karelian Institute, she works at the multidisciplinary research community of Finnish Literature Society (SKS).

In her article-based doctoral dissertation, she combined views from linguistic anthropological and folklore studies’ performance and practice theories with interdisciplinary affect and emotion theories and applied text, music and sound/voice analyses and sensory ethnography to reach the emotions and the affective power of laments through the archival audio material. In her postdoctoral research, she concentrates on the continuum of varying lament tradition from Karelian ritual practice to the practices and performances in contemporary Finnish society. During last couple of years, she has collaborated with a lamenter-musician Emmi Kuittinen.

Silvonen defended her doctoral dissertation in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki in January 2022. She graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Folklore Studies from the University of Turku in 2014. Silvonen is a member of the editorial board for the Elore Journal. She has founded a popular science blog Päivystävä folkloristi (‘a folklorist on-call’) with her colleagues.