I believe in a traditional university institution: the seminar. Witnessing the intellectual growth of talented students and contributing to it are the best things university teaching can offer a teacher. I also want to do my part in passing on the tradition of humanities research to the students, just like my own supervisor, academy professor Markku Peltonen did for me.

Growing as an academic also requires Aristotelian habituation and that in turn calls for some partly humorous encouragement; such as suggesting to students in their twenties that it is good to get up in the early hours before the rest of the family wakes up in order to have time to read research literature. Some students, as I did, will take this seriously, which will lead them to ponder the dawn of academia. That is how it is; academic research is per se an internal struggle. Research work will certainly never come to an end, and ideas develop even when you sleep.

Informal communication with other researchers has proved a central incentive for developing my own activity. At the party following the defence of my doctoral thesis, a colleague of mine remembered how, when I was working on my Master’s degree, I had the habit of phoning very late at night to share my latest discoveries related to early modern political thinking. Once, after an excited, near hour-long monologue, I had apologised for needing to whisper. The reason was that I had my firstborn in my arms and if the baby had woken up, my wife would have been angry with me.

Taking part in different kinds of conferences and building personal and working international relationships has been central to my work. My first conference happened to be at the very beginning of my doctoral studies. I had received project funding for some months for my doctoral thesis on the condition that I assisted at the international conference on the history of political thought organised in Helsinki. I took the task seriously, and the speakers at least were sure to have water in their glasses at all times. It was a hot summer.

On the penultimate evening of the event, we had a customary conference dinner. I excitedly got into telling a fellow from Trinity College, Cambridge about my study. At the end of the evening we came from Suomenlinna to central Helsinki and soon enough we found that the bars were closing. I walked my international guest to their hotel on Mikonkatu. By then it was already four o’clock in the morning. I began thinking that if I took a taxi home, I would still have to catch the bus in the morning and be back at 8 am– I wouldn’t get much sleep. It would be most sensible, then, for me to sleep on the renowned sofa in the corridor of the Renvall institute, where they say even Lenin once sat.

My plan was something like the following: if I set my phone’s alarm early enough, everything would be all right. I woke up in the morning a little after eight to someone tapping me on the shoulder. Sitting up, I noticed my phone on ringing the floor. It was Heikki Mikkeli, the then director of the department and main organiser of the conference, who had woken me. I thought, now Heikki is going to be angry at this new doctoral student, but instead he asked me kindly if I would like some coffee or if I would still like to sleep a little longer. He understood the multifaceted nature of the academic night. The very same day I also realised that the late-night discussion had not just been an exchange of anecdotes, as the very same fellow had arranged an academic exchange for me at the University of Cambridge. The internal struggle had paid off.