Andrew G. Newby
I am a historian who has also worked for several years in various multidisciplinary institutions and institutes. I arrived at HELA in September 2021 as a university lecturer in the field of transnational and comparative history. I have always been interested in different areas of the humanities and social sciences and different periods of history. My main focus is the history of Northern Europe during the "Long 19th century", but I have also worked on recent and contemporary history, especially Nordic society and politics. I originally studied Classics and Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews before changing my degree towards Ancient and Medieval History.
As an Irishman studying in Scotland, I gradually became more interested in the similarities and differences between Scottish and Irish history. When the time came to plan my PhD project, my preference was to compare the two, either in the Middle Ages or in the modern era. I chose the latter and spent happy years as a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh. In 1998, I visited Finland for the first time, and a year later I moved to Helsinki and worked as a researcher at the University of Helsinki's Renvall Institute (European Studies section).
In 2004, I was appointed as a lecturer in Scottish History and Celtic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. I worked there until I moved further north to the University of Aberdeen (Senior Lecturer in the Department of History), in 2008. At that time, most of my work was related to comparative or multinational studies of the history of Scotland, Ireland and the Nordic countries. In 2010, I accepted a two-year research position at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies to study comparisons and contrasts between the great famines of Ireland (1840s) and Finland (1860s).
After that, I was awarded a scholarship of the Academy of Finland (2012-17) and positions at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies (2017-18) and the Tampere Institute for Social Research (TIASR) (2018-20). Along with articles, books and media appearances, one of the most significant results of this period was my successful about the great famine in Finland. I have also developed a that maps over a hundred memorials to the Great Hunger Years and adds related local information and other reflections.
After working mainly as a researcher for a long time in these interdisciplinary institutes, I returned in 2020 to a full-time teaching position as a University lecturer in Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki. It was a difficult time in many ways due to the global pandemic, but it gave me the opportunity to develop new teaching methods and find ways to maintain student motivation and team spirit.
Especially in the era of digital, searchable primary sources, I believe it is important for historians to maintain "traditional" archival skills, which can often involve fruitless days poring over dusty papers, but can be very rewarding in the long run. Moreover, while I spend a lot of time in archives and libraries, I also enjoy researching and getting to know places related to my research. In the case of Finland, this has meant travelling for weeks on end, over thousands of kilometers, visiting different places, and researching monuments, mass graves and other memorials related to 1860s Great Hunger Years.
My latest monograph, , was published by Palgrave in 2023. In the future, I plan to research famine and natural disasters in the Danish Empire in the 19th century, and in particular the way in which charity from Denmark was used by the state to increase control in its peripheral areas (such as Iceland, Greenland and the Caribbean). In my free time, I run around Jyväsjärvi, hike in the mountains (unfortunately not so easy in Finland), walk along the windy Atlantic beaches on the west coast of Europe and play Gaelic football with my longtime club Helsinki Harps GAA.
