Nordic Baltic Connections in Action: SASS 2025 Reflections from Liina-Ly Roos

AABS is pleased to congratulate Liina-Ly Roos for the successful completion of her travel grant to attend the 2025 conference of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS). Roos used her grant to support her travel and present her research on the novel Stalin’s Cows (2003) by one of the bestselling contemporary Finnish authors, Sofi Oksanen.

Roos’ full report is below, edited and published by AABS with her consent. Please enjoy!

Building Understanding through Nordic-Baltic Exchange

Travel Grant Report from Liina-Ly Roos

I am very grateful to receive the AABS Early Career Scholar Travel Grant that supported my participation in the conference of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS) in Minneapolis in April 2025. My research often engages with cultural texts from both the Nordic and Baltic countries, and my paper at SASS, titled “Health, Unwellness, and Dis Location in Narratives of Migration across the Baltic Sea: Sofi Oksanen’s Stalin’s Cows,” contributed to the larger efforts between SASS and AABS to create more intellectual dialogue and connections between the scholarship of the two fields, Scandinavian and Baltic studies.

I proposed my paper as part of the stream “Dis-Location” that was inspired by Robert Tally’s book Topophrenia and called for papers that engage with cultural texts that are interested in a negative “place-mindedness,” problematize topophilic ideas of location and show experiences of feeling uneasy or out of place. My paper discussed the novel Stalin’s Cows (2003) by one of the bestselling contemporary Finnish authors, Sofi Oksanen, whose work is often inspired by her own memories of growing up in Finland with an Estonian mother and visiting Soviet Estonia. Stalin’s Cows features multiple storylines of a girl going back-and-forth between Finland and Soviet Estonia with her mother, her family’s traumatic memories of Soviet deportations and occupation, and her developing a chronic eating disorder while growing up and observing Estonia becoming re-independent.

I argued that in the novel’s literary mapping of the two sides of the Baltic Sea, Finland and Estonia as separated by distinct boundaries, Stalin’s Cows is preoccupied with discourses of health and ability. My paper demonstrated that while drawing from simplified and problematic stereotypes of Eastern Europeans as culturally and temporally dislocated from Northern/Western Europe, the novel at the same time imagines a profound sense of spatial anxiety on both sides of the Baltic Sea; it imagines that anxiety as intertwined with the politics of health, unwellness, and gender expectations.

Furthermore, I argued that the novel approaches critically the meaning of development in post-Soviet societies, a popular and troubled concept that as Katerina Kolarova has shown in her theorization of “the rehabilitative grammar of post-socialist transition,” assumes that regions described as less developed than the global North / the West need to be rehabilitated into the sameness of the Western world.

It was incredibly helpful for me to present this work that I plan to revise into an article to be submitted during fall 2025; and it is also connected to my new research project, tentatively titled Rethinking Narratives of Health, Care, and Unwellness in Northern Europe, which will also feature cultural material from both sides of the Baltic Sea. While the other panelists in my panel at SASS 2025 focused their presentations on Norwegian culture, all of the four papers were connected by the panel’s sub-theme “Dis-ease and Haunting” in interesting and productive ways. The panel was well-attended (with around 35 people in the audience) and one of the other panelists commented at the end that my paper demonstrated poignantly why it is important to know about Baltic culture to fully understand Nordic literature. While my aim is not to force connections between texts in Nordic and Baltic cultures, I continue to be inspired by so many organic and productive dialogues within this broader region.