This year, the J.V. Snellman Public Information Award was granted to Tuomas Heikkilä, a versatile hand at popularising research. Heikkilä advocates for making the knowledge and wisdom found at universities available to society.
Scholarly knowledge is too valuable to remain within the confines of universities. This is the opinion of the Faculty of Theology's Professor of Church History , who received the J.V. Snellman Public Information Award at the anniversary celebration of the University of Helsinki on 26 March 2026.
"The University of Helsinki boasts more knowledge than any other institution in Finland. When such an institution presents me an award for a theme I consider important, it warms the heart and inspires me to do even more in the future," Heikkilä says.
In the justification for granting the award, Heikkilä is described as being engaged in significant public efforts, particularly through his popularisation of historical research. According to Heikkilä, current events makes it easy to say that decisions based on accurate knowledge and thinking based on education are now needed more than in a long time.
"Scholarship and research hold the keys to most problems. The challenge lies in how to make these keys more widely available. All the knowledge and wisdom held at the University must benefit society as a whole."
School visits and live broadcasts
As a populariser of research, Heikkilä is a veritable Renaissance man. Besides interviews and elected positions, he is adept at unusual methods too.
In the week preceding this interview, Heikkilä welcomed pupils specialising in history at the Vantaa Region Steiner School, while earlier in the winter he visited a school in Helsinki's Töölö district to give a talk about local history to first-graders. He is also familiar to television viewers. In February, he sat in a television studio, giving a running commentary on the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in a broadcast by the public broadcaster Yle. His previous television appearances include the coronation of Charles III and the funeral of Pope Francis.
"In these settings, I always try to highlight cultural and historical research-based knowledge. Individual details can generate insights: 'Oh, that's what the crown actually means.' Explaining the meaning of individual symbols to people may leave an imprint that lasts a lifetime."
Multidisciplinary mediaeval studies
Heikkilä believes he has found his calling, which makes talking about scholarship and research fun instead of an arduous duty.
As a historian, Heikkilä specialises in the Middle Ages. Through his research and public engagement, he has tried to expand typical notions of the Dark Ages, which may not have been that dark after all.
"I'm not trying to whitewash anything, but to give a truthful understanding of the Middle Ages. In essence, all ages have been pretty similar, and our times certainly won't look that glamorous in a hundred or two hundred years. Every era has its bright spots and shadows - there are always fools and rogues, but also good intentions."
The poor reputation of the Middle Ages is partly down to limited source material. Even though hundreds of thousands of books, manuscripts and other documents have been preserved from the period, estimates point to no more than 10% of all books, for example, having survived. This lack of knowledge has created gaps that people have filled using their imagination. As an example, Heikkilä points to many imagining that the witch-hunts took place in the Middle Ages, even though they actually happened later.
For researchers, such knowledge gaps naturally present opportunities.
"From the scholar's perspective, the Middle Ages are enchanting: there are a lot of data, but also substantial gaps in sources. To understand the period, we have to develop our research methods. Multidisciplinary research is essential in mediaeval studies."
Heikkilä himself applies such a multidisciplinary approach in the he is heading. It is the first Finnish research project in the humanities to receive a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), amounting to no less than €13 million.
The project combines methods from the humanities and natural sciences in its effort to determine how in the Middle Ages, books linked Northern Europe to Western Europe. The researchers are utilising bioscientific methods to take DNA, protein and isotope samples from parchment made of animal skin. They are also using artificial intelligence and other computational methods to trace with algorithms how texts hand-copied elsewhere spread and transformed in Northern Europe.
"The world is far too complex to be studied from the perspective of individual disciplines. By instead investigating the past using many disciplines, we are looking in three, four or five dimensions instead of one or two. That way, we see much more."
Humanities scholars, be brave!
Heikkilä believes that many university researchers are needlessly passive and do not fully understand their potential for impact. Too many are content to conduct research for other scholars, unable or unwilling to make wider audiences aware of their findings.
"If we leave research knowledge that is obtained through great effort within the University, it will of course be useful, but not nearly as useful as it could be."
While serving as the director of the Finnish Institute in Rome's Villa Lante from 2013 to 2017, Heikkilä, together with Academician of Science Ilkka Niiniluoto, conducted an extensive survey on what Finns think about humanities research. Several citizen surveys and interviews with some 200 influential figures in different fields resulted in a pamphlet on the value of research in the field. The news was both good and bad:
"Finns value humanities research and consider it important for society. They felt that research in the field can offer solutions specifically to major societal questions, such as the future of democracy.
"Unfortunately, we also saw that scholars in the humanities themselves are passive and overly negative about their opportunities for influence. There seems to be even more demand for them in public discourse. Indeed, our pamphlet urged researchers to take on a more substantial role."
Heikkilä points out that scholarly articles have a limited impact. For instance, the results of historical research only gradually seep into people's consciousness, and textbooks in the field regularly lag about a generation behind the latest research knowledge. As solutions to disseminating knowledge he offers both a proven conventional model and a new one unfamiliar to many in the academic community: non-fiction books and YouTubing.
"Concise non-fiction books are shortcuts to public engagement, gaining wider audiences than scholarly articles and holding more societal leverage. Non-fiction books also provide researchers with a new mode of thinking, as they try to present their research results as accessibly as possible."
As for short YouTube videos, Heikkilä awakened to their power when he saw those watched by his eight-year-old daughter.
"It's fascinating to see how addictive they are, even with totally inane content. We also need new forms for conveying research-based knowledge, or the world will become only less knowledgeable. The airspace that ideally belongs to scholarly knowledge too is now filled with content that is harmless as such, but also trivial."
