Arno Rafael Cederberg (1885–1948) was one of eight Finnish scholars who began working at the Estonian-language University of Tartu in the early 1920s. As the first professor of Estonian and Nordic history, he formulated the primary goals for the development of Estonian history as a national field of academic scholarship and created the necessary prerequisites for this – he founded the Academic History Society as a centre for historical research, initiated the compilation and publication of various academic publications, and trained a whole cohort of young Estonian professional historians (e.g. Hans Kruus, Hendrik Sepp, Juhan Vasar, Otto Liiv, Evald Blumfeldt, Arnold Soom, etc.), whose task was to continue the work that he started. After working in Tartu for eight years, Cederberg decided to return to his homeland in 1928 to continue his teaching career at the University of Helsinki.
Unfortunately, with his departure, both the professorship of Estonian and Nordic history and the professorship of general history, which Cederberg had filled since the death of the professor of general history in 1924, became vacant at the University of Tartu; the associate professorship was already vacant. Since none of his students had defended their doctoral dissertations by the autumn of 1928, there was no one who could take over the organization of teaching Estonian and Nordic history without further delay and with full responsibility. However, academic teaching had to continue in any case. That forced the University of Tartu Faculty of Philosophy to repeatedly ask Cederberg to review master’s and doctoral theses, participate as an opponent in dissertation defences, and examine doctoral students. Thus, Cederberg played an active role in the work of the Faculty of Philosophy until the autumn of 1931, when Estonian historians took up the professorship and associate professorships.