Cecilia af Forselles’s research interests and areas of specialisation are:

• Oral tradition and literary culture
• The cultural history of translations of The Kalevala
• Literary memory and currents of thought
• The History of European ideas, science and learning
• Communication, the information society and libraries

Her most recent studies have dealt with oral and literary culture, the history of learning, ideas and culture and the history of translations of the Kalevala. She has investigated both the reappraisal and rise to prominence of oral culture at the end of the 18th century and professionalization in the Turku academic community, aided largely by the newspaper articles of Henrik Gabriel Porthan. In addition, she has written on such themes as the emergence of a new reading and book culture introducing a new set of ideas in Helsinki at the end of the 18th century and how The Kalevala was translated into English for different purposes and for different readers.

The translation of The Kalevala into English gave the work fresh significance and it was a part of the vast supply of folklore material to English language readers. It was not only European folklore material but also the folklore collected by British officials, military personnel, missionaries and women from Britain’s overseas territories in Africa, Asia and Australia that were translated into English. These translations of folklore have affected post-colonial and postmodern cultural works, which recognise multi-dimensional perspectives, layered sociocultural phenomena and the formation of supranational identities. The translation of material into English and the connected changing supranational meanings of the material have persuaded researchers to question Herder’s conception of folklore as the union of language, national spirit and state.

Folklore was changed into written form and translated into a different language, English, in a different country,  for readers who could barely have been able to imagine the original tellers of these tales. Folklore tales were no longer told in a certain place, around the fire as night drew in. Instead, they were read at any time of day or           night, irrespective of time or place across the entire English-speaking world, ‘the story-time of the British Empire was all the time’ (Naithani, 128). This does not only affect colonial folklore but also other material translated into English, which thus received supranational meanings.

(Cecilia af Forselles, Englanninkieliset käännökset. Kalevalan muuttuvat ylikansalliset tehtävät. In Kalevala maailmalla. Kalevalan käännösten kulttuurihistoria, 2012).

Cecilia af Forselles is not the only woman in her family to have been interested in oral culture, the Kalevala and the literary works of Elias Lönnrot. One of her forebears, Jenny af Forselles, edited Elias Lönnrot’s Swedish works. As a result, in 1908 and 1911 the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS) published the works Elias Lönnrots Svenska skrifter utgifna af Jenny af Forselles, parts I and II.

• Cecilia af Forselles on the Finnish Literature Society website (in Finnish)