People

Laura Hellsten, Doctor in Systematic Theology

Biography

Hellsten is a Doctor in Systematic Theology from Åbo Akademi University. Her first Master was in Education, from Oulu University and her second one was in Theology from Åbo Akademi. She has lived and studied in Portugal, Sweden and the US. Currently, she is placed in the archipelago of the Åland Islands where she lives with her cat Moses on Kökar.

She published her dissertation Through the Bone and Marrow: Re-examining Theological Encounters with Dance in Medieval Europe with Brepols in 2021.

After finishing her doctoral work on Dance and Theology, Laura Hellsten had a post-doctoral position within the Stiftelsen Åbo Akademi-funded Center of Excellence BACE. BACE is a collaboration centered on developing a platform for bioelectronic activation that enables the control of cell signals and, thereby, the stimulation of cell functions. Hellsten did ethnographic fieldwork with the research group investigating questions of Ethics and Science Communication. To study science communication, Hellsten developed and led the research project  Avtryck i det okända – Forcing the Impossible , which created collaborations between artists and researchers in the broader context of Åbo Akademi.

Eduardo Abrantes, PhD Philosophy

Biography

Educator, sound artist, and artistic researcher born in 1979 in Lisbon, Portugal. Based in Copenhagen since 2015. Currently engaged in independent artistic work, lecturing in Performance Design and Art and Technology at Roskilde University, collaborating with the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, and conducting postdoctoral research at the Polin Institute of Åbo Akademi University. Research focuses on the intersections between sound art and natural science, emphasizing embodied, site-specific, and process-driven creative approaches. eduardoabrantes.com

Tinka Harvard, MTh

Biography

Tinka Harvard is a doctoral student in the Doctoral Programme in Theology at the Faculty of Arts, Psychology, and Theology at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research project of centring the silenced and unseen voices of the women in the medieval travel accounts is a part of the larger research project, The Praxis of Social Imaginaries –a Theo-artistic Intervention for Transdisciplinary Research. The research is transdisciplinary, welcoming dialogue and encounters between different epistemological practices and cosmologies. She is from Brooklyn, New York and has earned a BA from Wagner College, a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and a Master of Arts from Åbo Akademi University in Finland.