The University is Helsinki’s powerhouse of scholarship for the humanities. It is such a self-evident and multiply-networked part of the capital that I am only now, after 50 years of studies and research, beginning to understand it properly.

There is a strong sense of continuity, from the mass university of the baby boomer generation in the 1950s to this day. In the 1950s, they wanted to change everything, which has happened, but the core remains the same. And I’ve often been at the core. First in subject-specific student associations Eidos and Historicus (in perpetuity) as well as the region-based Östra Finlands nation, the student organisation representing South-eastern Finland. Then learned societies entered the picture with their various tasks, projects and boards: Historiska Föreningen, Svenska litteratursällskapet, the Finnish Literature Society, the Finnish Society for the History of Science and Learning, and the newer Finnish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

My network of old teachers, fellow students as well as my own students has been ever-present: in the publications of learned societies, in exhibitions and research projects by other institutions, in the National Archives, the Finnish National Gallery, the Finnish National Board of Antiquities. And, on top of all that, in the media: on TV, on the radio, in the newspapers. An intellectual arena of its own kind has been Ny Tid, the formerly left-wing magazine, for which I have contributed columns on current affairs for over a decade.

I have also been an active board member in two foundations, which is another small but important sector of the humanities: Stiftelsen Finlandssvensk bokkultur, which gives small burseries to writers of non-fiction and textbooks in Swedish, and the Foundation for Research in Effective History, which is making a cautious attempt to bring the continental (Foucauldian) idea of Wirkungsgeschichte (‘effective history’) to Finland.