Linda Kaljundi is a historian and curator, Professor of Cultural History and head of the Master’s programme at the KVI. She has researched Estonian and Baltic history writing and cultural memory, as well as the entangled histories of science and the environment of this region. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki. Prior to joining the Estonian Academy of Arts, she worked as a research fellow and Associated Professor at Tallinn University and as a postdoctoral and research fellow at the Finnish Literary Society. As a visiting scholar, she has worked at the University of Lund and the University of Copenhagen, and as a Fulbright Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2024.
She has written articles and edited collections on history writing, historical novels and images, heritage, histories of the environment and science and decolonisation. Together with Tiina-Mall Kreem, she has published a monograph Ajalugu pildis – Image in Image in History: National and Transnational Past in Estonian Art (2018).
She has curated several exhibitions at the Kumu Art Museum, including The Conqueror’s Eye (2019, with Eha Komissarov, Kadi Polli), Landscapes of Identity: Estonian Art in 1700–1945 (2019, with Kadi Polli), Art or Science (2022, with Jaanika Anderson, Keni Ird, Kadi Polli, Kristiina Tiideberg; in collaboration with the University of Tartu Museum), Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023, with Eha Komissarov, Ulrike Plath, Bart Pushaw, Tiiu Saadoja).
She is currently leading the collaborative project How to Reframe Monuments (2024–2026) between the Estonian Academy of Arts and Tallinn University, which is looking for new solutions to recontextualize monuments and dissonant heritage.