Janne Lahti

I am a historian (PhD University of Helsinki) specializing in global and transnational histories of settler colonialism, the American West, German colonialism, and Nordic colonialism. I currently work as a researcher in the SUN (Surviving the Unthinkable) project, focusing on histories of Indigenous survivance and ecological destruction in North America and the Sápmi. 

I have published numerous articles, edited special issues, and eight books, including Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America (with Rani-Henrik Andersson; Helsinki University Press, 2022), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World (Palgrave, 2021), Cinematic Settlers (with Rebecca Weaver-Hightower; Routledge, 2020) and The American West and the World (Routledge, 2019). I also serve as the chief editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies.

Research

 My research and teaching have dealt with questions concerning the shapes of settler colonial power and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on borderlands, American West, the German Empire, and Finland and other Nordic countries via transnational and global history. In a sense, I have advanced global approaches to the study of settler colonialism.

The global history-approach becomes useful as it represents an attempt to think outside the nation-state, and to emphasize movements, flows, relations, and circulation that crossed national boundaries without ignoring them. It can be understood as a perspective that avoids a tunnel vision where the focus is exclusively on national societies and thus allows us to overcome the sharp division between “internal” and “external.”