Uppsala and Liverpool are important cities to me both for their academic contacts and their historical significance. My entire family lived in Uppsala between 1995 and 1999, as did my husband and I with our dachshund for the spring term of 2014. I visited Liverpool John Moores University in 2012 and 2015, when we organised a workshop there with the Fragmented Visions project. I have forged links with researchers of working-class culture and literature at other English universities as well.

In the early 1990s my entire family travelled twice to Canada, where my studies focused on the mining community of Timmins and South Porcupine. As an Academy Research Fellow, I was able to study North American archives once again, and I found a new research topic: the Finnish community of Rockport and Lanesville in Massachusetts, of which extremely extensive archival materials survive. The archival materials are now located at the Finnish American Heritage Center in Hancock, Northern Michigan. Consequently, in recent years I have divided my time between these places.