Katja Kontturi has a PhD in Contemporary Culture Studies. She defended her thesis, Don Rosa’s Disney comics as postmodern fantasy in December 2014 at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In her thesis, she analyzed how comics depict fantasy and argued that Rosa shapes the conventional Disney comics by combining fantasy and postmodern depiction of history.
Kontturi’s research interests lie in comics, fantasy and other speculative fiction, Disney, postmodernism, therapeutic uses of comics, and comic blogs. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä in a project called “Digital Stories of the Invisible Youth.” Her latest article dealt with fantasy and intertextuality in Don Rosa’s “Escape from Forbidden Valley” which was published in the anthology Comics and Power (2015).
Kontturi is a member of NNCORE (Nordic Network for Comics Research), FINFAR (The Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research) and both the Finnish and Danish Donaldist Societies.