PhD Kari Silvola is a grant-funded researcher in Creative Writing and Literature at the Ģֱ. He defended his dissertation, A Darkroom of My Own: Confessions of a Male Model. An Autoethnographic Study of Internalized Self-Discrimination and Passing for Straight, in 2025, receiving the grade pass with distinction (honors), with Professor Tony E. Adams (Bradley University) and Dean Graeme Harper (Oakland University) as his external examiners, and Professor Adams as his opponent.
He is currently working on several projects:
The Posthumous Stamps of Tom of Finland: Geospatial Research, Data Analysis, and Sensory Biographical Urban Studies on Underground Homosexual Networks in the Shadow of Censorship. This project aims to map the network of so-called Tom’s Men from its early beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s to the present day.
The Unmourned Grief of Gay Men: “It Was Not Even Possible for Us to Dream of Fatherhood.” An Autoethnographic Study in Writing Workshops. This study examines the unmourned grief related to fatherhood among gay men—a loss that has neither been recognized nor openly grieved.
A Comparative Study on Multicultural Conceptions of Sexuality and the Nuances of Sexual Diversity from Christer Kihlman’s Novels to the Present Day. The goal of this research is to explore the shifting dynamics of sexuality and power in contemporary Finland, particularly through the lens of age, race, sexual orientation and preference, class, trade and commerce, religion, nationality, immigration, and language in relationships between men.
New Confessions: Autoethnography on Individual Emotions, Experiences, and Their Cultural Meanings. Confessionalism is one of the key concepts and most visible societal phenomena of the 2020s. Public confessions, revelations, and the sharing of personal traumas have become commonplace. Modern confessions take the form of social media spectacles and marketable autobiographical or autofictional narratives in books, magazines, television, and digital platforms. They are often genuine expressions of human vulnerability, but in a mediated neoliberal reality, they also function as capital. Confessions are instrumentalized to generate economic profit and sustain societal divisions between winners and losers, the healthy and the sick, the well-off and the struggling.
This research project, which focuses on creative writing, explores new modes of confession and investigates how confessionalism can be used as a research method and what kinds of knowledge can be produced through confessional writing—i.e., confessing. In this project, Silvola further develops the metaphor and writing style he has termed “confessional sfumato” (Silvola, 2025) and conducts literary-artistic experiments to refine it further. The aim is to understand the cultural dimensions of individual emotions and experiences and the broader societal structures connected to them by turning an autoethnographic, reflective gaze toward oneself as a writer, experiencer, and researcher.
Silvola’s research in creative writing and literature, gender and masculinity studies focuses thematically on closet epistemology, intersectionality, queer theory, masculinity studies, sexualities, race, and class. His queer theoretical orientation draws critically upon Judith Butler’s performative theory, lesbian and gay studies identified as social constructionism, and Michel Foucault’s radical anti-essentialism.
His work has been published in SQS, Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, and Scriptum.
Silvola has guest lectured at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, and Greifswald Universität, Greifswald, Germany. In 2023, he was a visiting scholar at the School of Film, Theater, and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is also a book review editor for NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, published by Taylor & Francis.
Silvola has also completed university pedagogical studies (25 ECTS) and is currently undertaking a 25 ECTS study program in feminist pedagogy through the HILMA network. He has worked regularly as a fixed-term lecturer in creative writing within the discipline of literature from 2021 to 2025.
Silvola is the Vice Chair of the Finnish Society for Queer Studies (SQS) and an active member of Friends of Queer History, ICAE, IAANI, EACWP, as well as the KANTTI and VIHI networks.