Philological fieldwork in London and Turku

Philological fieldwork in London and Turku
If you trust Wikipedia, fieldwork refers to “the collection of information outside a laboratory, library or workplace setting”. However, philological ‘fieldwork’ often takes place within a library – but instead of reading secondary literature, we examine primary materials. I’m currently a visiting scholar at Queen Mary University of London. During my stay here, I work ...

Shakespeare 400 revisited

The Shakespeare 400 course was organised jointly by the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University in autumn 2016. After the first lecture on the history of English and the early printing history of Shakespeare’s works, the students delved deeper into other topics in Shakespeare studies. Aino Mäkikalli discussed Shakespeare’s sonnets, situating them in their ...

Shakespeare 400 in Turku 1

Shakespeare 400 in Turku
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. Universities and other institutions around the world have been organising special events and courses throughout the year. One of these special courses is Shakespeare 400, a joint effort of the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University. The course runs from late October ...

More Poetry from Our Students

Wizard Battle Inside enchanted magical valley Dark, narrow, ominous alley Dastardly, evil, warlock-meeting Legendary Thor, coming, greeting Attacking with spells, fantastic blunder Powerful, brave, controlling thunder Using lightning, scary, frightening Boldly fighting, wrongs righting Calling strong blizzards Freezing poor wizards Impervious to pain Summoning rain Until Enemies swimming in water Old Nordic tales, better than ...

Poetry from our students

This academic year, our (mostly) first-year students have been assigned poetry-writing as a part of the Academic Writing Skills I course, taught by Henno Erikson Parks and Justin Parks (no relation). Our poetry expert and recent PhD, Elina Siltanen, selected some of the poems to be showcased here on the blog for your enjoyment. Well ...

Mixing and Switching

Mixing and Switching
”Etkö voisi please auttaa tässä?” ”And then she was like, no ei se mitään.” As language users – speakers, writers, listeners, readers – we are constantly surrounded by linguistic data, and some of the material we observe is bi- or multilingual. The examples above may not be authentic (as in ‘cited from a corpus of ...