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

Philology, pragmatics and code-switching: My first viva
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

A month in northern England
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

Trextuality – at the intersection of textual scholarship and translation studies
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

Visiting Poland and gaining international experience
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

A Poetry Researcher’s Field Day
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

Eating elephants
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 ...

Hamlet in Turku

Hamlet in Turku
The Department paid a visit to see Hamlet in the Turku City Theatre in March 2019. The production has garnered good reviews both by critics and audiences, and it was great to have an opportunity to see it, especially as the season is, alas, short. SPOILER ALERT – what happens in Hamlet If you like ...