Festschrifts and academic festivities

Festschrifts and academic festivities
One catch-phrase nowadays is that universities are dynamic. Indeed, there are many changes going on during each academic year. But there are also traditions that are valued by the academic community. For instance, the academic year has the opening ceremony in September and the graduation ceremony, publiikki, in June where new MAs are celebrated. In ...

A Day to Remember 1

A Day to Remember
What happens when three professors of the School of Languages and Translation Studies retire at the same and give their valedictory addresses in the same room? There is of course a full house, with colleagues, collaborators, students, friends and family in attendance. The addresses are full of memories from the professors’ long careers, both personal ...

”Once upon a Time There Was University: Yliopistoon! To the University!”

”Once upon a Time There Was University: Yliopistoon! To the University!”
In the summer of 2005, I happened to read a Finnish detective novel by Matti Hälli, titled Sopimatonta kuolla yliopistolla (1943) [It Is Unbecoming to Die at the University]. The text intrigued me so much that I wrote a short piece on it to the University Employee Unions’ magazine, Acatiimi. What was then just an ...

A Tale of Two Departments

A Tale of Two Departments
The two English Departments in Turku, Åbo Akademi and Turun Yliopisto, congregated, as has been the custom over the years, for a joint retreat, this time on the island of Seili in the Turku archipelago. Seili, of course, is the island historically (in)famous for its leper colony and later its mental institution. For the last ...

Bridging North America: Inauguration of the John Morton Center

Bridging North America: Inauguration of the John Morton Center
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 ...

Hard Work Made Easy

Hard Work Made Easy
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 ...

Shakespeare’s Othello: Still Contemporary after 400 Years

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

Networking and applying linguistics
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 ...

Gradutalkoot Oct 18, 2013

Gradutalkoot Oct 18, 2013
Hackathon (from hack+marathon) is an event in which software developers collaborate on new projects for a set period of time. A hackathon usually starts with a presentation on the theme of the event. Then, teams are formed and work on the software projects is started. At the end of the event, results are presented. Inspired ...