Ott Valdeko Kurs

Ott Valdeko Kurs (born 24 March 1939) is an Estonian geographer, ethnologist, turkologist and scholar of Finno-Ugric peoples. He is professor emeritus at the University of Tartu. His work has focused on human geography, especially cultural and political geography, ethnic minorities, borderlands, and the geography and historical development of Finno-Ugric peoples.

Early life and education

Kurs was born in Tartu on 24 March 1939. He graduated from Tartu 5th Secondary School in 1957 and from Tartu State University in 1963. While at university he initially studied economics, but in 1959 began studying Turkology in the orientalist cabinet of Pent Nurmekund; he continued those studies in Azerbaijan in 1965–1966. He later undertook further study in Baku, Moscow, Joensuu, Stockholm and Granada.

From 1968 to 1970, Kurs was a postgraduate researcher at Tartu. In 1971 he defended his Candidate of Geographical Sciences dissertation, Экономико-географические основы административно-территориального деления на примере Эстонской ССР ("Economic-geographical foundations of administrative-territorial division on the example of the Estonian SSR"). In 1997 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Helsinki.

Career and scholarship

Kurs spent most of his academic career at the University of Tartu, where he began teaching in 1966 and later served as professor of human geography. He is now professor emeritus.

In a 2001 international evaluation of Estonian human geography, Kurs was identified as the principal researcher in one of the field's core research profiles; the report associated his work with cultural and political geography, the history of Estonian geography, Estonia's place in the Baltic cultural area, and the spatial organisation of Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia and other frontier regions. In her overview of cultural geography in Estonia, Helen Sooväli wrote that Kurs had engaged more than any other Estonian scholar with Anglo-American cultural geography, especially through studies of ethnic minorities and their problems.

Kurs's later research included the project Trends of social life of indigenous populations on cultural frontiers: examples on Baltic and Black seas regions and Central America, which he led at the University of Tartu from 2006 to 2009. His published work has covered such topics as Ingria, the Veps people, indigenous Finnic populations in north-western Russia, the Turkic world, and the historical geography of Estonia.

A University of Tartu profile published on his 65th birthday credited him with more than 250 scholarly publications and more than 30 expeditions, mainly to areas inhabited by Finno-Ugric peoples, and noted his role as editor of the yearbook of the Estonian Geographical Society from 1992 onward.

Work on the history of geography

Kurs has also written on the history of geography in Estonia and helped republish the work of the interwar geographer Edgar Kant. He edited Kant's Linnad ja maastikud in 1999 and Eesti rahvastik ja asustus in 2007. A review in Sirp described the 2007 volume as an important return of Kant's work to Estonian readers and identified Kurs as its compiler and author of the preface.

Honours

In 1997, Kurs was named an honorary doctor of the University of Helsinki. In 2001 he received the Order of the White Star, 5th Class. In 2004 he received the University of Tartu Grand Medal.

Selected publications

• Kaardisõnastik (1994)
• "Ingria: The Broken Landbridge between Estonia and Finland" (1994)
• Etnilisi vähemusi ajas ja ruumis I (1998)
• Maailm, Euroopa ja Eesti. Poliitilisest geograafiast (1999)
• Geography in Estonia 17th–20th centuries (1999)
• "The Vepsians: An Administratively Divided Nationality" (2001)