Nora Hämäläinen

Erik Allardt Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor (Docent) of Philosophy, University of Helsinki

Nora Hämäläinen is Associate Professor (Docent) of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki,
where she received her doctoral degree in 2010. Between 2009 and 2011, she was Editor-in-
Chief of the Helsinki-based cultural journal Ny Tid. She was a visiting researcher at the
University of Chicago in 2012 and a Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced
Studies between 2013 and 2016. Her research interests include moral philosophy, practices of
self-improvement, philosophical methodology, philosophy and literature, and the philosophical
work of Iris Murdoch.

Hämäläinen is the author of Literature and Moral Theory (Bloomsbury, 2015) and has co-edited
the anthologies Skilsmässoboken [The Divorce Book] (Helsinki: Söderströms, 2008, with Solveig
Arle) and Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (New York: Bloomsbury,
2012, with Niklas Forsberg and Mikel Burley). Her most recent articles include ‘Sophie, Antigone,
Elizabeth: Rethinking Ethics by Reading Literature’ in Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The
Search for Ethical Content in Literature, ed. Garry L. Hagberg (Oxford University Press, 2016);
‘Latour’s Empirical Metaphysics’, in Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 17:1 (2016, with Turo-
Kimmo Lehtonen); ‘Reduce Ourselves to Zero?: Sabina Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, and Feminism’, in
Hypatia 30:4 (2015); and ‘Self-Help, Moral Philosophy, and the Moral Present’, in Human Studies
39:2 (2016).

At SCAS, she will work on a monograph on self-improvement and self-work in popular culture and
moral philosophy.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2016-17.