Petteri Pietikäinen

Petteri Pietikäinen attained his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1999, and was nominated as Adjunct Professor (Docent) in the history of science and ideas in 2003 at the same university. He did his post-doc research in Ireland (University College Dublin), the US (MIT) and, lastly, in Stockholm, Sweden, as a PI of a research project.

He has been Professor of the History of Sciences and Ideas at the University of Oulu since 2011. During the past 12 years he has mainly studied the histories of madness, psychiatry and "abnormal psychology" as well as the relations between the human sciences and social engineering. He has also led research projects,  including one that forms part of the Oulu University Profiling Area "FibrObesity" (2021-26).

He has now started a new book project in which he examines adjustment thinking (social, psychologial, "racial") in the 20th -century United States, starting from World War I and the Americanisation programs of the era, and focusing on the ways in which European immigrants as well as African-Americans from the southern states were studied by social scientists and psychologists in Chicago between ca. 1914-1945. 

List of recent publications (2019 onwards):

Books:

- Otto Pipatti & Petteri Pietikäinen (red.) [eds], Moral, evolution och samhälle. Edvard Westermarck och hans närmaste krets. Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratursällskap, 2021. [‘Morality, evolution and society: Edward Westermarck and his inner circle’]

- Kipeät sielut. Hulluuden historia Suomessa. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2020. [History of Madness in Finland]

- Petteri Pietikainen & Jesper Vaczy Kragh (eds), Social Class and Mental Illness in Northern Europe. London: Routledge, 2019.

Articles:

- 'The Republic of Fear: Mental Illness in the Finnish Civil War of 1918’. Social History of Medicine, Published online: 23 February 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkac065

- Suomenruotsalaisten joukkopsykologiset tulkinnat Suomen sisällissodasta’. Faravid – Historian ja arkeologian tutkimuksen aikakauskirja Vol. 53, 2022

 ‘”A psychological riddle demanding a solution”. Crowd psychology and the Finnish Civil War of 1918.’ History of European Ideas, Published online: 01 Dec 2021, https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2021.2009358

- Vilma Niskanen & Petteri Pietikäinen: ’Rikollisuus ja sosiaalisen disorganisaation teoria Chicagon sosiologisen koulukunnan tutkimuksissa 1918-1948.’ Kriminologia 1, No. 1/2021

- ‘Psychiatry and Society’. In D. McCallum ed., The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_97-1

- ‘Marginalisierung und Stigmatisierung in Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Psychoanalyse: Die Fälle Wilhelm Reich und Erich Fromm’. In Mathis Lessau, Philipp Redl & Hans-Christian Riechers (Hg.), Heterodoxe Wissenschaft in der Moderne. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2021.

- Petteri Pietikäinen & Otto Pipatti, ’Johdanto’ [’Introduction’]. In Otto Pipatti & Petteri Pietikäinen (eds), Moral, evolution och samhälle. Edvard Westermarck och hans närmaste krets. Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratursällskap, 2021.

- Otto Pipatti, Jouni Ahmajärvi & Petteri Pietikäinen, ’Westermarckilainen evolutionismi’ [’Westermarckian evolutionsim’], in Otto Pipatti & Petteri Pietikäinen (eds), Moral, evolution och samhälle. Edvard Westermarck och hans närmaste krets. Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratursällskap, 2021.

- Petteri Pietikäinen & Otto Pipatti, ’Ultimate and Proximate, Genetic and Environmental. History of the Explanations of Altruism since the 1960s.’ In Esa Ruuskanen and Heini Hakosalo (eds), In Pursuit of Healthy Environments. Historical Cases on the Environment-Health Nexus. London: Routledge, 2020.

- ‘Abnormal psychology’. In Robert J. Sternberg & Wade E. Pickren (eds), Cambridge Handbook of the Intellectual History of Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

- Petteri Pietikainen & Jesper Vaczy Kragh, ‘Professionalization of Psychology in the Nordic Countries’. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of Psychology. Online Publication Date: Oct 2019. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.597

- ‘Pity the Poor Patient: The Indigent Mentally Ill in Late 19th and Early 20th-Century Finland.’ In Petteri Pietikainen & Jesper Vaczy Kragh (eds), Social Class and Mental Illness in Northern Europe. London: Routledge, 2019

- Petteri Pietikainen & Jesper Vaczy Kragh, ‘Unsound of Mind: Crime, Madness and Forensic Psychiatry in Denmark and Finland in the First Decades of the 20th century’. In Petteri Pietikainen & Jesper Vaczy Kragh (eds), Social Class and Mental Illness in Northern Europe. London: Routledge, 2019

- Petteri Pietikainen & Jesper Vaczy Kragh, ‘Introduction’. In Petteri Pietikainen & Jesper Vaczy Kragh (eds), Social Class and Mental Illness in Northern Europe. London: Routledge, 2019