Terje Toomistu appointed Estonian Visiting Fellow for 2026–27

We are very pleased to announce that Terje Toomistu will be our second Estonian Visiting Fellow for the next academic year. An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker from Estonia, she is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Cultural Research and holds a Noor-Eesti Grant awarded by the Postimees Fund. She completed her PhD in Ethnology, along with two MA degrees in Ethnology and Communication Studies, at the University of Tartu, and has previously held visiting positions in Indonesia, at the University of California, Berkeley (as a Fulbright Fellow), and at the University of Amsterdam.

Her research explores how cultural meanings shape social life, with a particular focus on gender, mobility, and affect. She is widely recognised for her work on Indonesian gender and sexuality and late Soviet youth counter-culture. Alongside her academic work, she is also an accomplished documentary filmmaker and founder of Cece Film, with projects that bridge anthropology and artistic practice.

During her fellowship, Terje will develop her project Affective Governance, War Anxiety, and the Moral Politics of East–West Migration in Europe: The Estonian Case, which examines how war-related anxiety shapes public debate and everyday understandings of migration, responsibility, and belonging in Estonia and among Estonian migrants in Western Europe. We very much look forward to welcoming her to our academic community.