Annamari Vänskä

I received my PhD dissertation in art history and gender studies from the University of Helsinki in 2006. After my doctoral degree, I have held many positions at various instituions nationally and internationally. In 2014-2016 I worked as Collegium Researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, in 2010-2013 as Associate Professor at the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, in 2007-2009 as University Teacher and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki and in 2002-2007 as Researcher at the Department of Art History at the University of Helsinki. I have also worked as Visiting Research Fellow at Parsons the New School of Design in New York and at Central Saint Martins in London, UK, and as as Visiting Researcher at the Centre Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies and at the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds, UK. I am currently a Visiting Professor at the Shanghai College of Fashion (SCF) at Donghua University in Shanghai, China.

I have published widely, both nationally and internationally. My PhD dissertation (2006) was the first art historical dissertation in Finland to analyze art and fashion imagery in the wider context of “visual culture”. It represented a new opening to art historical research. The same innovative yet critical ethos is present in my monograph Fashionable childhood: Children in Fashion Advertising (2017, Bloomsbury Publishing, http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fashionable-childhood-9781472568465/). It sheds light on fashion in the social context, on social meanings of fashion and clothing, and on the conflicting connotations emerging from the interface between childhood, fashion and clothing in contemporary visualized consumer culture. The book is an edited version of my monograph Muodikas lapsuus (2012, Gaudeamus) which was awarded the prestigious prize “The Best Scientific Book of the Year 2012 Honorary Mention” in 2013 by the national science academy The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.

I am also the co-editor with Professor Hazel Clark (Parsons the New School of Design, New York) of the book Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond (2017, Bloomsbury Publishing, http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fashion-curating-9781474287128/) which is a critical investigation about the emerging field of fashion curating.

An important part of my scholarly work is curating exhibitions. My largest curatorial project so far is Boutique (2012) which investigated the relationship between art and fashion. The original version of the exhibition was displayed at the Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland in 2012 in the wider frame of World Design Capital Helsinki -project. Afterwards the exhibition became a body of works that was edited into new exhibitions in collaboration with other curators and institutions: in Washington and New York (2013), in Tokyo (2014), and in Berlin (2016).