Elle-Mari Talivee

Elle-Mari Talivee is a senior researcher at Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and a researcher at Tallinn University. She is representing Estonia in the Horizon 2020 project on environmental humanities, entitled “Citizen Science for Environmental Citizenship: Backyard Birding and the Potential for Cultivating Green Engagement (EnviroCitizen)”, which involves seven European scientific institutions.

Beginning in 2011, when she embarked on museum work at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre, Elle-Mari Talivee has edited and written scholarly commentary for the volumes of Friedebert Tuglasʼ collected works, overseeing the publication of research materials related to the museumʼs collections, and participating in organising art exhibits and museum events. At the museum, she has supervised activities related to participation in the national programmes “Estonian Language and Cultural Memory” (2011–2013 and 2014–2018), and continues to coordinate both the use of the scholarly collections to support conservation of cultural-historical collections and the ASTRA project (2015–2020), the final outcome of which will be the digitisation of the Under and Tuglas Literature Centreʼs scholarly collections, making them available to online users. Both the collections themselves and research foci derived from them have been the basis for organising seminars and conferences in museums and elsewhere in Estonia, for example the working seminar on the literary representation of an industrial city held in Narva (2018), or on contacts between birds and literature at Matsalu (2016).

Since 2013 Elle-Mari Talivee has been a member of an international network, the Association for Literary Urban Studies. In 2019 she co-edited a special issue on urban studies of the journal Methis. Studia humaniora Estonica. The journal is co-sponsored by the Chair of Estonian literature and theatre studies chair at the Institute of Cultural Studies and the Arts of the University of Tartu and the Estonian Cultural History Archive of the Estonian Literary Museum. She has worked as a visiting fellow at the Åbo Akademi University at Turku (2020, HERA project “Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting: PUTSPACE”).

Elle-Mari Taliveeʼs primary research areas are literature and the city, the reflection of environmental history in belles lettres, but also literary criticism and the translation of Estonian literature into foreign languages under the auspices of the Estonian Literature Information Centre. She has a keen interest in early 20th century Estonian history, the events of the 1905 revolution and their literary representations. She is open to opportunities for collaboration in any of these fields.