Miika Tervonen wins the Vuoden Tiedekynä academic writing award

This year’s Vuoden Tiedekynä award has been given on 30 March to the historian Miika Tervonen for his article Historiankirjoitus ja myytti yhden kulttuurin Suomesta (“Historiography and the myth of a monocultural Finland”).  The article was published in the collective volume Kotiseutu ja kansakunta. Miten suomalaista historiaa on rakennettu (eds. Pirjo Markkola, Hanna Snellman & Ann-Catrin Östman, SKS 2014). The 25,000 EUR award is given for a scholarly article well-written in Finnish. This year, the field was humanities research.

Tervonen’s article is about a hypothesis that one encounters often in Finland: that Finns are culturally (or even racially) exceptionally homogeneous. A monocultural Finland was a central myth related to the national self-understanding, and it became established – without proper arguments – in historiography during the early 20^th century. Tervonen’s material consists of 19^th and 20^th century historiography from Finland.

See Tervonen’s own blog post on the topic: http://www.koneensaatio.fi/en/blogi/myth-of-culturally-homogeneous-finland

The winner of the Vuoden Tiedekynä 2017 award was selected by professor Pirkko Nuolijärvi, former director of the Institute for the Languages of Finland.

The purpose of the Vuoden Tiedekynä award is to promote academic writing in Finnish and the accessibility of research knowledge. The award is given annually on a rotating basis in the fields of humanities, social sciences and environmental research.