EnglanTY ← What the dickens is happening at the Department of English, Turku University

Organizing an in-service teacher training module – societal interaction at its best

Jun

5

2023

During the academic year of 2022-2023, the English Department and the Centre for Language Learning Research (Leala) have had the pleasure of hosting a national in-service teacher training module for second or foreign language (L2) teachers in Finland. We named this module SuSuKi, which stands for Sujuvuutta suulliseen kielitaitoon (roughly translated as “making oral language ...

So-Swiss-ticated in Zurich

May

31

2023

Switzerland. The home of cheese, chocolate, the Alps… and a bustling English Department at the University of Zurich with an overwhelmingly well-stocked library that I could have lived in for the entirety of my four-week stay and I still wouldn’t have even scratched the surface, and a staff that welcomed me with open arms? As ...

A long way to Arcanum: the English Department on the move

Apr

21

2023

When the staff of the English Department have just moved into their brand-new premises in the newly renovated Arcanum building on the University’s lower campus at the beginning of 2023, this may be a convenient moment to take a brief look at the previous oases on the itinerary of the departmental caravan from its beginnings ...

Finding the Right Answers in Fiction

Mar

16

2023

Nana Arjopalo gave an outstanding performance defending her doctoral dissertation Narrating Deliverance: The Literary Double in the Writing of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Bharati Mukherjee on Friday, February 24, 2023. The viva was a true celebration of literature and the impact it has on humanity. Professor Joel Kuortti testing the connection, picture and ...

Becoming an English teacher in Namibia and Finland

Nov

24

2022

This autumn, the School of Languages and Translation Studies has had a visitor from the University of Namibia (UNAM), Dr Meameno Shiweda, who is a specialist in teacher education. In this blog post, Meameno and Janne Skaffari talk about similarities and differences in what and whom they teach and, more broadly, in the educational systems ...

A DOCTORATE will be given for the completion and defense of a dissertation

May

30

2022

Susanna Mäkinen defended her doctoral dissertation, Stability and variation in the genre of runaway slave notices in American newspapers 1704-1865, on Friday 20 May 2022. While the never-tiring doctoral researchers of the English department have produced quite a few dissertation and vivas to accompany them in the recent years, Susanna was the first one to ...

Defenses during Covid: Traditions and pandemics

Feb

7

2022

Sirkku Ruokkeinen defended her doctoral dissertation, Historical appraisal analysis: evaluation of the book in sixteenth-century England, on Saturday 4 December 2021. The defense is a culmination of years of work, and as such, often a stressful event. While the dissertation itself is naturally the focus of the years prior, the event itself has its own ...

75 Years of the Joys of English

Dec

21

2021

The Department of English became a subject department at the University of Turku 75 years ago in 1946. In 1980, translation studies were transferred from Language Institutes into the university, and were merged with the philology departments in 2010. We celebrated this anniversary on Tuesday 14 December 2021. The Corona epidemic had postponed the occasion ...

Defending alchemy 1

Jun

2

2021

Doctor in spe Sara Norja defended her doctoral dissertation, Alchemy in the Vernacular: An Edition and Study of Early English Witnesses of The Mirror of Alchemy, on Thursday 27 May 2021. Here, she writes about the viva and the days leading up to it. Due to the pandemic the viva was on Zoom, so the ...

A year of remote learning – and cats 1

Apr

16

2021

What a year it has been! This could easily be a long blog post about the effects of the pandemic on teaching and learning and what pedagogical solutions have been implemented and experimented with at the department, but today we have more important things to discuss. We need to talk about cats. This year has ...