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. From 2020 to 2023, she was the Estonian representative of the Horizon 2020 project on environmental humanities, entitled „Citizen Science for Environmental Citizenship: Backyard Birding and the Potential for Cultivating Green Engagement (EnviroCitizen)“, which involved 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 fields derived from them have been the basis for organising seminars and conferences at the museum 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 at the Institute of Cultural Research and Arts of the University of Tartu and the Estonian Cultural History Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum. In 2022, however, Elle-Mari Talivee together with Ulrike Plath and Kadri Tüür edited a special issue of Methis on environmental humanities, which was dedicated to environmentalism and where the research results of the project „Estonian Environmentalism in the 20th century: ideology, discourses, practices“ (PRG908) were reviewed.

Elle-Mari Talivee 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”) and, with the support of the National Archives, studied the preserves in the archives of England about Minni Kurs, an Estonian social democrat and women’s rights activist.

Elle-Mari Talivee’s primary research areas have been literature and the city, the reflection of environmental history, including industrial landscapes and Estonian mining areas in fiction, as well as 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 the early 20th century Estonian history, the events related to the 1905 revolution and their literary representations. In the recent years, she has been able to combine hobby and science, i.e. amateur bird watching and the study of the history of Estonian ornithology and amateur/citizen science.