Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen

Special areas:

• Medieval history and literature in Latin
• rhetoric and poetics
• relationships between oral and literary culture
• historiography of the Middle Ages and in the early modern age

As Secretary General, Tuomas Lehtonen is responsible for the management and operating environment of the Finnish Literature Society.

Lehtonen is currently researching the relationships between the oral and literary and the vernacular and Latin-language cultures in the Middle Ages and the early modern age in Finland. He is a member of the board of directors of the Nordic Centre for Medieval Studies, which is a Nordic centre of excellence, and jointly manages with Professor Lars Boje Mortensen (Odense, Bergen) the project’s cultural team.

Lehtonen’s academic background is medieval research and he is an adjunct professor in European history at the University of Helsinki. He has earlier studied Latin secular poetry and satires from the 12th and 13th centuries. His doctoral thesis (1995) was on Carmina Burana, the concept of Fortuna and venality satires. He has subsequently carried out research on chance, Fortune and concepts of providence in historiography from the 11th to 13th century. Lehtonen has written about medieval cultural history in Finland and studied theoretical debate on rhetoric, poetics, the theory of language and semiotics.

Curriculum Vitae

Julkaisut / Publications