Johannes Riquet (PI)

Professor of English Literature, Tampere University

Johannes Riquet is the Principal Investigator of Mediated Arctic Geographies.

He is the author of The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics (OUP, 2019) and the co-editor of Spatial Modernities: Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries (Routledge, 2018) as well as Imaging Identity: Text, Mediality and Contemporary Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2019). He is the head of the research group “Spatial Studies and Environmental Humanities” at Tampere University and a founding member of the international research group “Island Poetics”. Alongside the project, he is also working on a monograph on interrupted railway journeys in British and American literature and film. His research interests include representations of Arctic, island narratives, railway journeys in literature and visual culture, theories of space and place, travel writing, cinema, cultural geography, and phenomenology.

Johannes has written a number of articles and book chapters on Arctic imaginaries, including the essay “Islands Erased by Snow and Ice: Approaching the Spatial Philosophy of Cold Water Island Imaginaries” (2016), a chapter on Arctic geopolitics and visual culture entitled “Cinema, Geopolitics, and Arctic Landscapes: The Cold Cold War in Orion’s Belt” (forthcoming in Shimmering Worlds: Conditions of Arctic Visuality, ed. Markku Lehtimäki, Arja Rosenholm and Vlad Strukov, Routledge), and a chapter on recent utopian and dystopian climate change narratives set in Greenland, “Frozen Futures or Tropical Greenland? Climate Change Arctopias in Cold Earth (2009) and Allatta! 2040 (2015)” (forthcoming in Nordic Utopias and Dystopias, ed. Pia Maria Ahlbäck et al., John Benjamins). He also guest edited a thematic section on Ice and islands in the most recent issue of the journal Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures.

In addition to his academic engagement with the Arctic, Johannes has a personal interest in Northern cultures, languages and landscapes, though he is of Southern (Swiss, French and German) origin. The image above shows him a few kilometres from the village of Sarfannguit in Western Greenland. Johannes can communicate in several languages spoken in the North - Kalaallisut (or Western Greenlandic), Finnish, and Norwegian - and is currently learning Inuktitut.

Johannes Riquet can be contacted at johannes.riquet@tuni.fi