EnglanTY ← What the dickens is happening at the Department of English, Turku University ← Page 7

Bridging North America: Inauguration of the John Morton Center

Apr

30

2014

The recently launched John Morton Center for North American Studies held its inaugural event on Tuesday, April 29, in the University of Turku’s Calonia building. The Center’s new director and powerhouse Benita Heiskanen did not rest on her laurels in starting the center’s activities: in the past three months she has already, with the help ...

More Poetry from Our Students

Apr

23

2014

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

Apr

10

2014

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 ...

The path to graduation is paved with… a new curriculum 1

Mar

7

2014

‘OMG it’s happening again’ may have been many a teacher’s first thought last autumn when planning the new MA degree began at the School of Languages and Translation Studies. This is the third curricular reorganization in ten years, and everyone is worried about the time that planning always takes, which is time away from research ...

Upcoming event: MA Thesis Symposium

Feb

20

2014

11 March, 10-12 Lecture room X The first MA Thesis Symposium of the English department was organised last year. Six speakers, from different Advanced Studies tracks, gave a ten-minute paper on their pro gradu projects. The audience consisted of students and staff members, and many good questions were answered after the presentations. The second MA ...

Hard Work Made Easy

Feb

7

2014

On the last day of January, 2014, a fifty-strong crowd gathered in the Tauno Nurmela auditorium to listen to the defence of Elina Siltanen’s doctoral dissertation “Hard Work? Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Experimental Poetry”. The opponent who discussed the dissertation with Siltanen was professor emeritus Charles Molesworth (Queens College, The City University of New ...

Mixing and Switching

Jan

7

2014

”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 ...

Our Literary Lady in London

Dec

10

2013

I still often think of the hours spent reading for my MA dissertation in the English department seminar library in Juslenia in 2007-2008. At least in two distinct ways, those hours were to have a lasting influence on my life. First of all, they installed in me the desire to do further research. I had ...

Shakespeare’s Othello: Still Contemporary after 400 Years

Nov

18

2013

The story is a familiar one: a father cannot approve of his daughter’s elopement with a powerful and ambitious military leader, who, despite his respectability and his service to the powers that be, remains a social outcast due to his race. One of this leader’s trusted advisors, who feels that he has been passed over ...

Networking and applying linguistics 1

Nov

15

2013

The Finnish Association of Applied Linguistics (AFinLA) organizes an annual autumn symposium. The symposium is this year organized by the School of Languages and Translation Studies at the University of Turku. We expect to have more than 100 participants listening to plenaries, presentations and workshops on applied linguistic topics. The association is an important networking ...