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

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 ...

Two days to go: Upcoming defense on second language speech fluency

Sep

9

2020

Doctoral candidate Pauliina Peltonen will defend her PhD dissertation entitled Individual and Interactional Speech Fluency in L2 English from a Problem-solving Perspective: A Mixed-methods Approach this week on September 11th, 2020. The audience will be able to follow the defense online via Zoom. Professor Judit Kormos from Lancaster University will be the opponent and Dr ...

So long, Marianne: Professor Liljeström’s farewell lecture

Aug

28

2020

There are (at least) three important lecture occasions in a professor’s career. First, there is the sample lecture testing the professorial candidates’ teaching abilities when the post is filled. After being appointed to their post, the new professor gives an inaugural lecture to demonstrate their newly verified professorial wisdom. Finally, at the end of their ...

Translating multilingual texts

Feb

4

2020

Another PhD defence in just under two months! A number of doctoral candidates of the English Department are now finishing their research projects. On 24 January, it was Laura Ekberg’s big day. Laura’s research topic combines translation studies and literature and focuses on a phenomenon also studied in linguistics. As it happens, code-switching was at ...

Philology, pragmatics and code-switching: My first viva 2

Dec

17

2019

I had never been to a doctoral defence also known as a viva before, so I was immediately interested when I heard there was one taking place with our very own Aleksi Mäkilähde on the hot seat. Aleksi’s doctoral dissertation is called The Philological-Pragmatic Approach: A Study of Language Choice and Code-Switching in Early Modern ...

A month in northern England

Dec

2

2019

The bleak midwinter is approaching, so isn’t a throwback to last spring a wonderful idea? At the end of April, I left Turku to spend a month in the north-east of England. I had visited Durham for two days in 2015, transcribing little bits of English surviving in some Latin manuscripts, and written in my ...

Trextuality – at the intersection of textual scholarship and translation studies

Nov

6

2019

The XII annual colloquium of Variantti, the Finnish network of researchers working on textual scholarship and scholarly editing, was held on Friday, 4 October 2019, at the University of Turku to foster interdisciplinarity between textual scholarship and translation studies.The theme trextuality encompassed textuality, transmission and translation, concepts central in both fields. In translation studies, trextuality ...

Visiting Poland and gaining international experience 1

Jun

17

2019

This spring has been very memorable, as I have had the pleasure of being a Visiting Professor in Kalisz, Poland. A visiting professor can refer to various kinds of things in the academic world. In this case, I was invited to the Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. ...

A Poetry Researcher’s Field Day

May

31

2019

One might assume that literature research would not necessitate fieldwork, but sometimes it is useful to those of us working with such esoteric topics as contemporary US poetry as well. In early May, I visited the State University of New York at Buffalo, and particularly their library’s Poetry Collection, in search of more materials for ...

Eating elephants 1

Apr

8

2019

Nearly 1.5 years into my doctoral studies, I have already encountered some sort of block. Things are just not progressing the way I would like, something is not working. I feel like I have read every possible piece of available research about my topic but starting the first article seems like a horrendous endeavor. What ...