Professor Hanna Meretoja

Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland). She runs the projects ‘Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency’ (Research Council of Finland, 2023-2028) and ‘Narrative Agency Reading Group Model: Applications for Libraries, Schools and Hospitals’ (Research Council of Finland, Proof of Concept, 2025-2027). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (2019-2020) and Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford (2019-2020, spring 2023). She is also member of Academia Europaea and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Hanna’s research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, memory studies, and medical and health humanities. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has also co-edited The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020), Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (Routledge, 2018), and special issues of Memory Studies (Cultural Memorial Forms, 2021) and Poetics Today (Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom, 2022).

Hanna has published a novel, Elotulet (2022, The Night of Ancient Lights, Die Nacht der alten Feuer, 2024), which partly draws on her own experience with breast cancer and cancer grief. She has also scripted and hosted, with Astrid Swan, a podcast series, Syöpäsiskot (Cancer Sisters).