Shakespeare 400 in Turku

Posted on April 25, 2016 by elmava

Last week, our department – along with the rest of the world – celebrated Shakespeare as Saturday April 23rd marked the 400th anniversary of the Bard of Avon’s death. Why death, you ask? Well, because we do not know his exact day of birth, and in order to celebrate, we need a date! So, a date with Shakespeare it was on Friday, when the department celebrated with toasts and a jubilee lecture. The merriment began with a toast and a speech by Professor Joel Kuortti, who chronicled some ways in which Shakespeare has figured in his life, culminating in the words of Macbeth: “I drink to the general joy o’ the whole table”.

Followed by the toasts, the guest speaker, Helsinki University’s Senior Lecturer, Nely Keinänen gave a fascinating lecture on how Shakespeare’s plays were translated into Finnish and performed in Finland from the 19th century to the present day. We learned about the rich tradition of performing Shakespeare in Finland which interestingly coincided with and helped develop Finnish as a literary language. Translating Shakespeare into Finnish was seen as a great national victory for Finns, who now saw their own language take its place as a proper European language of culture. Shakespeare translations were and are yet another way for us Finns to prove ourselves that we are “most worthy friends” of English, French, and the rest.

Shakespeare, then, was crucial to making Finnish a language of sophistication, culture, and the arts, and our little gathering helped celebrate that fact among others. For a celebration of death, it was a very jolly occasion indeed, marking 400 years of the Bard’s “charmed life”.

Text and photos by Elina Valovirta
Quotes from Macbeth

p.s. Stay tuned for more information on the Faculty of Humanities’ joint Shakespeare 400 lecture course in Q2 next academic year. For more info on Shakespeare festivities in England, go to www.shakespeare400.org.

The Zoo

Posted on May 21, 2015 by elmava

An important part of academics’ work is attending conferences; think Presentation Skills meets Proseminar, or an MA Elective class, but with professors and researchers instead of students. While some of the best conferences are symposia with just a dozen or so papers, such as our own Linguistics Meets Book History last autumn, others are huge, with hundreds or thousands of participants. I went to a biggie in mid-May: the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

If you work on anything to do with the Middle Ages, the Kalamazoo congress will be on your bucket list. Affectionately known as The Zoo, it is an annual event organised by the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University. It is attended by 3000 medievalists each year, and this time the number of sessions was 567, each of them with three or more presentations, spread over three and a half days.

This was the first time I attended the congress, and I have to admit it was difficult to choose between so many intriguing-sounding parallel sessions. I tended to choose sessions which, one way or the other, focused on language; these were clearly in the minority as most of the speakers at The Zoo are historians rather than historical linguists. As much as you might learn from papers on topics that you are not that familiar with, it is often more useful to choose presentations which have some potential relevance for your own work. The clearly most linguistic session I attended was on polysemy in Old English, but I also went to three panels on translation, with papers on texts translated in the Middle Ages, translating medieval texts today, and on one occasion, not just rendering Chaucer in present-day language but also transmuting the Canterbury Tales into a comic book. One of my favourite sessions was a well-attended panel introducing some of the most ambitious projects for digitising medieval manuscripts; overall, Digital Humanities was quite prominent at the congress. My own paper on multilingual practices in post-Conquest England was in a less well-attended manuscripts session. As for the texts discussed at The Zoo, the English-language materials ranged from Beowulf to True Blood. For more on what went on at the congress, it is worth checking #kzoo2015 on Twitter.

Kalamazoo itself is the size of Joensuu and located a three-hour train ride from Chicago. My impression was that the town is known for three things: the Glenn Miller song from the 1940s, the range of local beers, and the university (might the last two be interconnected?). With 24,000 students, WMU is a good example of an American campus that is like a city within a city. The buildings are many, there are sports facilities and eateries, and in the middle there is a lovely green park complete with a pond (and swans). Many of the congress participants actually stayed on campus and slept in the dormitories. That part of the Kalamazoo experience I missed, as I stayed in a downtown hotel instead. Maybe next time?

Text and photos by Janne Skaffari

Beyond the ivory tower: Co-operation with a local upper secondary school

Posted on March 25, 2015 by elmava

When I was in upper secondary school (‘lukio’ in Finnish), two of my teachers organized a “Rome Club” (‘Rooma-kerho’), which could be taken as an optional course. In order to receive credit for the course, we needed to take part in a variety of activities, one of which was attending guest lectures by researchers and PhD students. I always found the lectures fascinating, and I thought that it would be great if, at some point in my life, I could do something like that myself.

In the autumn of 2014 the thought became a reality when I began my lecture series titled “The heirs of Rome” at my old school, Turun klassillinen lukio, where the Rome Club was still going strong. To be sure, the initial idea was to offer a single lecture to the club, but partly due to the nature of my chosen topic and partly due to the enthusiasm of the pupils it became clear that a series of lectures was in order.

The idea behind the series was to show how Roman (and, more generally, classical) culture had been kept alive following the collapse of the Roman Empire. This topic is especially relevant for my ongoing PhD research since I am interested in the status of Latin and Greek in 17th century England. Accordingly, the main focus of the lecture series was on Britain. The titles of the individual lectures were:

1. “The Classical languages in Britain”
2. “The status of the Classical languages in 17th century Britain”
3. “Classical education in the early modern period”

The second lecture was given in conjunction with the school’s 135th anniversary celebration in November. The fourth and final lecture, which will take place at the beginning of May, elaborates on the theme of education with examples drawn from my dissertation material.

I have found the lecture series a refreshing experience, and it seems that the pupils have enjoyed it as well. Although my dissertation focusses on theoretical matters, it has been surprisingly easy to come up with suitable topics for the lectures. One easily forgets that what seems self-evident to oneself may be completely new information to almost everyone else. I have also found it an excellent exercise to try and explain my own research in as simple terms as possible, because this makes it a prerequisite that I actually understand what I am talking about.

The Rome Club with their visiting teacher, Aleksi.

Text: Aleksi Mäkilähde
Photo: Reija Pentti-Tuomisto

The Department by the River

Posted on December 9, 2014 by elmava

As mentioned earlier in the Tale of Two Departments, there are two Departments of English here in Turku. Situated as we are on the University Hill, our department is known as the Department Up the Hill, while our Åbo Akademi sister department (right at the brink of the river Aura) is known as the Department by the River.

This year we have been determined to increase cooperation between the two units. Among other things, this means that we encourage our students to complete optional studies in the other department, allowing this way a wider selection of special fields.

On Halloween in October, we hosted a guided tour of the TY campus to the ÅA students and staff. On an exceptionally sunny and bright December afternoon, it was finally our turn to make a counter visit to the Åbo Akademi campus.

It’s Christmas time at the English Department by the River.

The ÅA Department’s intern Annette Byskata and doctoral student Adam Borch greeted us at the entrance hall of the Arken building, where most of the ÅA Humanities’ units are located. They directed us first to the second floor of the building and into the ÅA English Department’s corridor. We got to see where the Department office is located, but also learned that it will be moved soon because of changes in the admin staff. Also, we saw the Department’s three main lecture rooms (Helikon, Kramer and Donner), and sat down at the Kramer hall to meet the staff, hear about their teaching and to learn how to browse the ÅA website.

Our guide, Annette Byskata, at the Arken lobby.

The Head of the Department, Brita Wårvik, welcomed us to the tour and introduced us to the ÅA syllabus. Anthony Johnson, Jason Finch, and Stuart McWilliams gave us more detailed info on the Department’s literature courses. Signe-Anita Lindgrén, the SLA expert of the department, talked about the teacher track of the Department, while Martin Gill discussed the Department’s culture-oriented teaching. Finally, Brita introduced the discourse studies related courses available. During the Q&A with the staff, we discovered practical facts: e.g. that the ÅA term is divided into quarters differently from TY (something to consider when taking their courses!). Also, many of their courses last only one quarter, where as our courses typically last two quarters. These kind of differences may allow flexibility for TY students wanting to complete courses in a schedule different to ours.

The ÅA staff introducing their curriculum.

After meeting the staff, we were ready to continue with our tour. The next pit-stop was the Humanities library on the first floor of Arken. The librarian Maria Lassén-Seger greeted us at the library entrance and talked to us about the library customs and about the history of the building, which was originally a factory. In fact, the first Finnish tractor was built there! Maria took us to see the linguistics and English sections of the library’s collections before sending us off to the next stop of our tour, the Asa building.

Maria Lassén-Seger urges the TY students to use the ÅA libraries, too.

In the Asa building, Annette and Adam first guided us to the IT centre of ÅA on the first floor, humorously named “the Oracle”. Rumour has it that occasionally the helpdesk’s instructions are as ambiguous as the oracle’s advice in a well-written Greek comedy. Finally, we stopped by the course book library in the Asa building, where the students had the possibility to activate their TY library cards for ÅA use.

Warm thanks again to the staff of the Department by the River for inviting us and for organising such a fun and educational tour for us!

Text by Anna Kalpio
Photos by Anna Kalpio & Adam Borch

The TY group ventures from Arken to the Asa building.

Turku #PoPsymp 2014: International symposium of linguistics and book history

Posted on November 13, 2014 by elmava

Linguistics met book history on 24–25 October 2014 as twenty-odd participants gathered in the Turku Main Library for an invigorating two days of presentations and discussion on the interaction of linguistic and material issues in the study of historical text. Linguistics Meets Book History: Seeking New Approaches (aka the PoP symposium), was organised by the Department’s Pragmatics on the Page (PoP) team in association with the Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (TUCEMEMS).

We were treated to a number of stimulating presentations on topics such as code-switching, corpus studies, script-switching, otiose and ambiguous strokes, speech markers in manuscripts, layout and organisation of the page, genre markers, and reading practices. The majority of the contributors studied late medieval to early modern material, namely manuscripts and early books, letters, inscribed artefacts and various corpora.

The three keynote speakers demonstrated a variety of approaches to combining linguistics with historical and material context. Colette Moore (University of Washington) spoke on linguistic and scribal organisation in Middle English devotional texts. Her study focused on the use of visual and textual organisation in the interpretation of historical dialogues. Jukka Tyrkkö (University of Tampere) discussed multilingualism in early printed books, concluding that code-switching correlates with bibliographical features such as format. Daniel Wakelin (University of Oxford) delivered a paper on the communicative aspects of page-framing and the patterns of ruling.

Personal highlights for the writers included, for example, Anya Adair’s presentation on ambiguous (rather than otiose) strokes in late medieval scripts; Maura Ratia’s presentation on textual labels signalling genre, text type and/or discourse form; and Daniel Wakelin’s keynote on aesthetic functions and implications of e.g. prestige carried by such practical elements as page ruling.

The symposium concluded in a round-table discussion on the re-introduction of philology as a terminological starting point to studies of linguistics and book history, tactics for editing historical texts, and the usefulness of collaboration between people working on different time periods. The participants unanimously agreed that the symposium had been fruitful and everyone sounded excited about the idea of #PoPsymp2.0.

Scholars relaxing after a long day. The evening programme included a guided tour to the Aboa Vetus exhibition Letter by Letter: Traces of Reading and Writing.

Text and photos: Aino Liira, Sara Norja and Sirkku Ruokkeinen

Seven Wonders of the Frankfurt Book Fair

Posted on October 17, 2014 by elmava

Have you ever considered how brain waves can be transferred into poetry? Don’t worry. The Helsinki-based Brains on Art collective has solved the problem for us. With the help of a tinfoil hat – i.e. a sensor helmet – and computer magic, brain waves create poems. This is first of the wonders I found in the Frankfurt Book Fair 2014 where Finland was the Guest of Honour.

As I strolled the numerous halls and miles upon miles of corridors, I tried to locate the allure of this world’s greatest book event. The sheer size is the second wonder – 270 000 visitors during five days. There were mini-buses and modern cycle rickshaws to transport you from hall to hall.

Thirdly, I could mention a feature that was very welcome after dragging your feet around for hours. At least in two places there were massage points where you could get a 15-minute neck and shoulder rub for a negotiable fee. Body and soul indeed.

The fourth point is quite unbelievable. I did not buy even one book during my three days in the fair ground. Not due to abstinence but because the event is basically a trade exhibition with very little actual book selling. Business is done between publishers, agents and other book industry representatives.

As the fifth wonder, I must mention the extent to which translators and translations were present. This could be seen everywhere but particularly in the Finnland.Cool (yes, that was the motto) Pavilion where the centre sphere displayed nearly a thousand books on Finland and translations of Finnish literature.

As the sixth point, I was very pleased to see that the Helsinki City Library had driven their Mobile Children’s Library bus Skidi to Frankfurt. How cool is that!

The seventh wonder is no doubt book itself. With all the talk about the demise of the traditional format, book seems to be stronger than ever. Evidence to this could be seen in the stalls from all over the world, in any number of languages, in whatever genre, with whichever type of layout.

Oh, and if you want to know how my EEG translated into poetry, here’s the result:

I am waiting weeping watching for Thee
I have not forgotten it thou’lt do me
I have no name
I could lie down like a tired child

(Obviously, the computer cheats, so can you crack this and recognize the original poets/poems?)

Text and photos: Joel Kuortti

Festschrifts and academic festivities

Posted on June 27, 2014 by elmava

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 addition, professors give inaugural lectures when they are appointed. They also give a valedictory address when they retire as we have seen this spring with our Professor Risto Hiltunen (see earlier post)  .

Another academic tradition that the English department is following this year is that of a Festschrift. Festschrifts are commonly collections of articles published to honour a professor’s (or another academic’s) birthday or retirement. You can often recognise these when the name of a book says, for example, “essays in honour of”. When Festschrifts are published as books, they usually contain articles by the closest colleagues, collaborators and former doctoral students of the honouree. It is also common that the books are thematic and related to the honouree’s research interests. They may also include a biographical note and a tabula gratulatoria, which is a list of academic friends and colleagues who wish to congratulate the honouree. 

 A large part of universities’ funding is based on the publications we produce. After all, university teaching is based on research, and professors and lecturers are also active researchers. For funding reasons, it is better to publish articles in refereed journals. This means that many Festschrifts have also changed into a different format. Journals and publishers sometimes allow Festschrifts to be published in their series.

This year, we have the pleasure to publish another Festschrift, this time to honour Professor Päivi Pietilä. The theme is language learning, which is approached from many perspectives in the ten articles in the collection. The collection is a special issue in the AFinLA-e publication series and available for free here. Importantly, the Festschrift is a surprise gift to the honouree, so if you sense an air of secrecy and whispers along the corridors, chances are there is a Festschrift in the works. This time, the secret was luckily preserved until the end; to celebrate Päivi’s milestone in life, the editors gave her the manuscript as a bound golden thesis. With this publication, we want to congratulate Päivi and offer those interested in language learning many inspiring new studies to read.

The editors of the journal special issue, Pekka Lintunen, Maija S. Peltola & Mari-Liisa Varila with Professor Päivi Pietilä, the Festschrift honouree.

Text: Pekka Lintunen
Photo: Janne Skaffari

A Day to Remember

Posted on June 3, 2014 by elmava

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 recollections and accounts of the many changes in their respective fields of research and in university life in general.

And then there is the question of code choice: what should the language of the ceremonies be? We do not have to hypothesize about this, however, as we already know what happened when Professors Risto Hiltunen, Yves Gambier and Luigi de Anna gave their valedictory addresses in Room I in the University Main Building on 14 May, 2014. In spite of their different mother tongues and departmental working languages, all three professors gave their addresses in English, which was the dominant language of the festivities: most of the other speeches that afternoon were either English or multilingual. This interesting case of code-selection clearly reflects the role of English in academia, including our own School.

The multilingual (but dominantly English) festivities were by no means over once the speeches had been given in the afternoon. To celebrate Risto’s successful career and express our gratitude for having had such an excellent boss for 26 years, we threw him a surprise party in the evening – in Turku Castle, no less. Risto was fetched from his home, driven around the city blindfolded and eventually dropped off at the Castle. Upon entering, he was met by his jubilant colleagues, dressed to the nines (which in a Finnish academic context means not only formal dress but top hats and swords), after which he and his wife were invited to slip into medieval attire. The whole party were then taken on a guided tour of the Castle, the highlight of which was Risto being knighted in festive ceremony. What followed was a medieval banquet in the Queen’s Chamber, with an assortment of dishes served on rye bread instead of plates, several speeches and some musical entertainment. As the dinner ended and we left the Castle at eleven, we were greeted outdoors in the May night by the full moon and blackbirds singing – a wonderful way to finish a memorable day of celebrations.

Text & Photos: Janne Skaffari

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

Posted on May 22, 2014 by elmava

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 occasional piece has become a long series of texts – still continuing. After 50 articles, it was time to collect the pieces together – with some new material. The result is now a book called Yliopistoon! Kaunokirjallisia kuvauksia akateemisesta maailmasta (Gaudeamus 2013) [To the University! Fictional Accounts of the Academia]. Basically, I deal with novels and poems from the 14th century until the present day in which university, academic environment, and/or student life is in some way represented, lived out.

What I find most interesting in my explorations into the stories about and around Finnish universities (and a couple of detours into Nordic academic life) is that university life has not changed that much during the centuries. Sure, the physical environment has changed tremendously but the basic need to gain knowledge, the epistemological drive, as well as the requirement to educate students for the purposes of public life, has remained so recognizable throughout the ages.

In literary representations of university life, there is no end to murders, love stories, tragedies, parties, money troubles – or even studies. As an example, we can take for example the young writer and dramatist Emma Puikkonen who in her debut novel Turkulainen näytelmä (2001) [A Drama in Turku] combines contemporary student life with a story set in the Turku of 1590s. The protagonist, Nadia, takes part in a play by the Turku Student Theatre: Josef Julius Wecksell’s Daniel Hjort (1862). Nadia calls it the first Finnish tragedy, a Turku version of Hamlet. It is a story of Daniel Hjort and his beloved Sigrid Stålarmintytär, played by Nadia.

Nadia’s story is about identity crisis, about a Hamlet-type of person (not Ophelia) who is uncertain. She dreams of meeting one of the innumerable young, talented, dark-eyed, and anxious poetry boys Turku teems with. Her aimlessness is amply illustrated in her ride on the föri ferry as she goes back and forth without alighting. She watches the Art Academy students on the other side of the Aura river heading for the old rope factory, and the students of the (then three) universities on the other side cycling up “to the lecture halls and paper smell, the recluse research chambers which breed love for Sartre, bylaws or quantum mechanics” (p. 106).

Nadia’s and Sigrid’s lives get intertwined in the course of the novel in an interesting way. Nadia is not content with the director’s (or the script’s) version of Sigrid as the fragile angel on a pedestal. Nadia and Sigrid know that in the patriarchal world, the young woman always dies, all the more certain the more there is concealed passion. They want to be written differently, to write their own lives.

See also the blog, Café Pour Les Idiots, for a feature on the book in Finnish.
Text and Images: Joel Kuortti

A Tale of Two Departments

Posted on May 17, 2014 by elmava

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 50 years, the Archipelago Research Institute has had its base on Seili.

The retreat started from the River Aura, where the boat Aurelia picked us up on the two-hour sea voyage to Seili in sunny but cold spring weather. After settling in to our sleeping quarters and having lunch, it was time for official business. We started with a round of introductions, as despite a history of joint retreats, not everyone knew each other in advance. Informality characterises the retreats, and this one was no exception. Synergy cannot be achieved through official structures, but rather through interaction, spontaneity, and relaxed atmosphere. The retreats are ideal for that, as going away from your usual environment can foster new ideas.

Professor Anthony Johnson and PhD Candidate Aleksi Mäkilähde gave a presentation on their joint project on the Orationes, a collection of school plays from the late 17th century. Their excellent presentation was followed by Signe-Anita Lindgrén & Pekka Lintunen’s presentation on various learner corpora, as they chronicled the challenges involved in corpus-building, ranging from practical problems to comparability, but both also stressed that corpus-building is in fact lots of fun!

After the two joint presentations we were treated to an English-language guided walking tour of the island, on which we got to visit, for example, the island’s church which had a special section for those residents who had leprosy and thus were not allowed to sit with the other church goers back in the 18th century.

In the afternoon, the two Fulbright scholars, one past and another present, Chris LaLonde (SUNY Oswego) and Casie Hermansson (Pittsburg State University, Kansas) had a discussion about the Fulbright experience as a member of both English departments in Turku. For both Casie and Chris, the Fulbright period far exceeded their expectations, an evidence of which is the fact that this was Chris’s fourth time back in Finland since his Fulbright year 1997-1998. Taking the time to discuss the Fulbright’s benefits perhaps also served as reinforcement for the two departments’ ongoing commitment to keep the scheme going. After all, the Fulbright scholar is a teacher to whom students stick, as remarked by Professor Emeritus of ÅA’s English Department, Roger Sell.

After the Fulbright discussion, Casie and family were gifted with Åboriginal t-shirts, followed by the ÅA faculty’s moving and laughter-inducing tribute to Professor Risto Hiltunen, who is about to retire. They likened Risto to the current James Bond, Daniel Craig, and reminded him about his skill in cultivating friendships the same way that he accidentally cultivated mold in an old coffee cup back in the eighties.

The day was concluded by sauna and dip in the cold sea, followed by sausage-grilling, refreshments, enjoying the beautiful sea view, and continued conversation about the day’s topics.

The next morning, before leaving the island, we had a future-oriented workshop led by Risto, who reminded us about the twinship of the two departments, and encouraged the small groups to come up with practical suggestions about joint activities. The fruits this productive session will bear are to be seen, so both departments — including our students – will have lots to look forward to in the future!

Text: Elina Valovirta
Photos: Adam Borch

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