Your thesis in three minutes

Posted on March 21, 2017 by elmava

Thursday 9 March was an exciting day on campus, as it was the day for the final of the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, which was organized for the first time at the University of Turku.The competition was developed by the University of Queensland and the first 3MT competition was held at UQ in 2008. The idea is that doctoral candidates introduce their research to the public as interestingly as possible in three minutes. I decided to participate because the event offers an excellent opportunity to practice presentation skills. It also helps to understand the essence of your own research when you need to explain it to others in three minutes.

The competition started with two semi-finals in early February. The first semi-final was organized for the doctoral candidates within Humanities, Education, Social Sciences, Law, and Economics, and the other for doctoral candidates within Science and Medicine. From both first rounds five top presentations were selected to the final and I was honored to learn that mine was one of them.

The 3MT final drew a large audience in the Tauno Nurmela hall. The atmosphere was full of excitement and it was very interesting to get to hear of other people’s PhD projects from different fields. There were also good prizes for the best ones. Moreover, the winner gets to participate in the Coimbra Group Competition with the video that was filmed during the final. Three best video recordings of the presentation will continue to compete in a live competition in Edinburgh in the beginning of June.

In addition to the diploma all finalists received at the event, we all gained useful experience in giving a presentation and summing up our research. All in all, the whole experience was very positive and I hope that the University of Turku organizes this event in the future too. I encourage all doctoral candidates to grab the opportunity!

Text: Johanna Rastas
Photos: Johanna Rastas & The University of Turku

Shakespeare 400 revisited

Posted on January 11, 2017 by elmava

The Shakespeare 400 course was organised jointly by the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University in autumn 2016.

After the first lecture on the history of English and the early printing history of Shakespeare’s works, the students delved deeper into other topics in Shakespeare studies. Aino Mäkikalli discussed Shakespeare’s sonnets, situating them in their historical and ideological context. Anthony Johnson highlighted the influence of early modern school curricula on Shakespeare’s plays.

The Finnish translations of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets were introduced by Outi Paloposki. For example, in an early translation of the Scottish play, one of the characters is called Pirjo. Intrigued? Read the play here.

Tom Linkinen and Hannu Salmi approached Shakespeare from the point of view of cultural history. Linkinen discussed the ways in which genders and sexualities are performed in Shakespeare’s plays. Salmi, in turn, started from a mnemohistorical point of view, showing the audience examples of how Shakespeare has been interpreted on the silver screen. The last lecture by Joel Kuortti focused on the postcolonial rewritings of The Tempest.

The students also engaged in small group work. One of the tasks was to translate into Finnish Benedick’s troubled rant from Much Ado About Nothing (V.ii.35-41). It works quite nicely in the Turku dialect, too!

Text by Mari-Liisa Varila

Shakespeare 400 in Turku

Posted on October 28, 2016 by elmava

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. Universities and other institutions around the world have been organising special events and courses throughout the year. One of these special courses is Shakespeare 400, a joint effort of the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University.

The course runs from late October to mid-December. It comprises seven lectures by eight lecturers from four different departments: the Department of English at ÅAU, the Department of English at UTU, the Department of Cultural History (UTU), and the Department of Comparative Literature (UTU). There are altogether fifty students taking the course.

The lecture series started on 27 October with a joint lecture by Dr Janne Skaffari and Prof. Matti Peikola from our own department. Janne Skaffari offered a fascinating glimpse to Early Modern English and Shakespeare’s language. He finished the lecture by reciting a sonnet in what is known as ‘Original Pronunciation’, a reconstructed version of what ‘Shakespeare’s English’ might have sounded like. If that piqued your interest, have a look at Ben Crystal’s Hamlet here!

Matti Peikola then moved on to discuss the early editions of Shakespeare plays. Although the First Folio is the most well-known edition of Shakespeare, defining the canon for years to come, it was only published after Shakespeare’s death by his colleagues. However, Shakespeare’s plays were already published individually during his lifetime, in a smaller and much cheaper quarto format. The first quarto edition of Hamlet was much shorter than the First Folio version! You can read more about the quartos here.

Both Skaffari and Peikola reminded the audience that although Shakespeare has often been treated as a canonical author figure, many of his plays actually show evidence of collaborative authorship. Read more about recent findings here.

Text and photo by Mari-Liisa Varila

Postmodern feminist challenging of dominant discourses: Mehdi Ghasemi’s doctoral defence

Posted on June 16, 2016 by elmava

The second one of the two doctoral defences at the Department of English in the spring 2016 was Mehdi Ghasemi’s “Quest/ion of Identities in African American Feminist Postmodern Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks”. The public examination of the dissertation took place at the University of Turku on 10 June, 2016. The candidate’s performance in the defence was eloquent and he was able to justify his choices and elaborate on the points that he was requested to clarify. Despite it being a Friday afternoon in June, the defence was attended by more than thirty people – and it was conducted in an orderly fashion.

Mehdi Ghasemi’s doctoral dissertation is a study of three plays by Parks from the standpoints of postmodern drama and African American feminism with a focus on the terrains that reflect the quest and question of identities for African Americans, especially African American women. The study is a reading of three plays by Suzan Lori-Parks – The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), Venus (1996) and Fucking A (2000). Ghasemi’s interpretetations of the three plays offer valuable insights on this understudied playwright and genre. Ghasemi argues that “Parks in these plays uses postmodern drama and African American feminism to encourage reflections on intersectionality in order to reveal the concerns of African Americans, particularly African American women“ (p. i).

The opponent was Professor Jopi Nyman from the University of Eastern Finland, and Professor Joel Kuortti acted as custos. Professor Nyman posed demanding questions on the theoretical issues involved as well as on the particular analyses of the three plays. Mr. Ghasemi replied confidently, resulting in an engaging discussion that – judging from their reactions – was also appreciated by the audience. Finally, the opponent gave his final statement. There were no questions from the floor.

Mehdi Ghasemi is from Tehran, Iran and completed his MA on “Walt Whitman’s Loud Voice of Democracy and Individuality” at the Islamic Azad University of Karaj. The dissertation is published electronically in the Annales Universitatis Turkuensis B419.

Text by Professor Joel Kuortti, custos

The transmission of early scientific writing: Mari-Liisa Varila’s doctoral defence

Posted on June 14, 2016 by elmava

It is always a happy occasion for the whole department when a doctoral candidate defends their dissertation. This spring we were treated to not only one but two public examinations of doctoral dissertations. The first was that of Mari-Liisa Varila. On 28 May 2016, she defended her dissertation titled “In search of textual boundaries: A case study on the transmission of scientific writing in 16th-century England”.

Varila’s study concentrates on the text-production practices of scribes and compilers as they copied scientific (in this case, mostly astrological) texts in manuscript form. Early scientific writing has not been researched as much as the extant material would merit; nor has book production in the early sixteenth century been studied extensively, especially the production of manuscript books. Varila’s study helps to bridge both of these gaps in research. Her primary material consists of three English manuscripts including mostly scientific texts. These manuscripts have not been studied in detail before.

The opponent was Daniel Wakelin, Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at the University of Oxford. Professor Matti Peikola acted as custos. Wakelin and Varila engaged in a lively, intriguing discussion on matters scribal, textual and material. The enthusiasm with which both the opponent and the candidate participated in the discussion was palpable to the audience. Wakelin commended Varila on her innovative approach, which combines several disciplines in order to present an accurate picture of her manuscript material and conclusions.

The combination of approaches including manuscript studies, textual scholarship and historical discourse linguistics allows Varila to look at her material in novel ways and to understand the broader contexts behind the manuscripts’ production. She concludes that early scientific texts and works are often flexible in their boundaries. Scribes could copy selectively and the information content was often more important than the linguistic form. Material features are important: the constraints of the physical page can affect the texts being copied. Varila also shows that the connections between manuscripts and early printed material are a fruitful object of study. We were happy to attend such a successful examination, a fitting finale for the years of hard work!

Text by Sara Norja & Aino Liira
Photos by Miikka Varila

SLT historical linguistics seminar 13.5 – Winding through the dusty deserts of a lush philology, pt 2

Posted on June 9, 2016 by elmava

The seminar continued with the Department of Finnish and Finno-Ugric languages revealing its onomastic side, as we heard presentations from Kirsi-Maria Nummila and Regina Bűdi. Nummila studies medieval street names in Turku and the credit that is their due to Baltic Sea region city plans or the so called German city plan. This city plan seems to have been variously implemented by some big East-European cities like Stockholm, Turku, and Tallinn, and these cities, interestingly, share street names. In her research, Nummila has questioned the traditional view that medieval street names were formed quite spontaneously drawing from the functions and situation of the street, and suggests that they might rather have been borrowed along with the city plan. Bűdi studies the proper names in the Turku bishop Ericus Erici Sorolainen’s sermon collection (Postilla 1621/1625), and more precisely in its gospel text passages. She compares these proper names to the ones found in corresponding passages in Mikael Agricola’s New Testament (1548) and the first Finnish whole Bible (1642), as well as in mainly sixteenth-century German, Latin, Greek, and Swedish translations of the Bible. Her aim is to study the similarities and differences between the proper names from these sources, the degree to which Sorolainen’s proper names were impacted by foreign languages and historical language development, and the gradual assimilation of foreign personal names into Finnish. She also wants to specify the definition of some nouns that could be seen as both common and proper nouns.

Asta Rauhala from the Department of Scandinavian Languages presented her doctoral research that concerns early, thirteenth- to seventeenth-century, Swedish loans into Finnish. Rauhala’s goal is to discover the scope and semantic categories of especially the medieval borrowed vocabulary, the speed of the borrowing process, and the length of time the loans were used in written language. Perhaps this could even lead to new etymologies or to new perspectives on language contacts and life in medieval Eastern Scandinavia! Likewise related to Scandinavian languages is Kendra Willson’s (TIAS) study that examines the possibility of Finnish and Sami names and words appearing in Scandinavian runes, especially ones that we have not been able to decipher thus far. One tricky rune that Willson presented at the seminar reads ”MINVLESIÖMEPVRVANTA” that seems to include at least the words “to me” (minvle), and “eat” or “food” (siöme), and “porridge” (pvrv) in Finnish. It was a good brainteaser to have a guess at the meaning of this passage at the seminar.

Other researchers doing detective work similar to Willson are doctoral candidates Harri Uusitalo and Reko Tikka. Uusitalo from the Department of Finnish studies the Finnish translation from Swedish of a seventeenth-century land law document, the Aitolahti land law. Uusitalo will edit the document that is still in manuscript form and investigate its sources and its possible author based on for example handwriting and vocabulary. Two sources that are previous translations are already known, but there still are passages in the document that are from neither of these. One possible writer is Hartvig Speitz, who may have written the text while sitting a punishment in jail! Uusitalo also wishes to study the development of Finnish legal language. Tikka from the Department of Classics researches games of chance in ancient Rome and the early Middle Ages. Using written and archeological sources, he aims to find out what kinds of games of chance were played and what their significance and functions were to the players. For instance, their possible use in gambling is investigated. Tikka suspects the absence from many European languages of a verb denoting especially the play of children, that exists in Finnish and Swedish (‘leikkiä’, ‘leka’), may up to recent times have discouraged the study of games as a less dignified pursuit. This kind of research is to my mind great proof of how the knowledge of and research in languages can aid cultural and historical study. The dusty deserts of philology do not seem so barren after all.
Find out more about the historical linguistic research of each department on the UTU departmental websites under “Research and doctoral studies”.

Wishing everyone a creative, sunny, and relaxing summer!
On behalf of the seminar presenters,
Aino Haataja, MA, English

SLT historical linguistics seminar 13.5 – Winding through the dusty deserts of a lush philology, pt 1

Posted on June 9, 2016 by elmava

What games of chance did the ancient Romans play? What role did Latin have to play in fifteenth-century England? Can a portion of medieval street names in Turku be seen as loans from Baltic Sea region city plans, and to what degree do they draw their names from their context and functions, like a nearby market square? Could eighteenth-century runes in the Dalarna region in Sweden contain Finnish? What were the characteristics of a good book in the prologues of sixteenth-century English translated literature? Here are some examples of the questions discussed in the historical linguistics seminar of the UTU School of Languages and Translation Studies on May 13th 2016. We were many and the discussion was fruitful! Some key areas of research that were presented included multilingualism, paratextuality, historical onomastics, as well as vocabulary research and language contacts.

Multilingualism is a concept relevant to the research of Delia Schipor, Sara Norja, and Tuomo Fonsén. Schipor was visiting from the University of Stavanger, Norway, and her study focuses on the shift from Latin to English in documentary writing in late medieval England. She studies the interplay and relative proportions of English, Latin, and French in documentary texts, and explores the possible links between genre and code choice. This same shift into English, or the process of vernacularization (becoming native-like in language), but in scientific texts, is the object of Sara Norja’s doctoral study in the Department of English. She is making a digital edition of ten manuscript versions of an English alchemical text, The Mirror of Alchemy, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. She will examine the similarities and differences between the manuscripts, their transmission, and their relationship to European alchemical tradition. Tuomo Fonsén from the Department of German, on his part, studies multilingualism in pedagogical texts, that is in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pedagogical grammars of German in the kingdom of Sweden. These were bilingual, as Swedish was the medium of teaching German. He studies the writers, readers, and sources of these grammars, and the effects of a certain pedagogical approach on the linguistic philosophical stance of the grammars.

Paratextuality is a common denominator in the doctoral research of Sirkku Ruokkeinen and Aino Liira, both from the Department of English. Ruokkeinen studies the paratexts of sixteenth-century translated English literature aiming to find out how the work at hand is commented on, evaluated, and valued. She will use both theory on paratexts and the appraisal theory from discourse analysis as a basis for her work. Her study might even offer some answer to what constituted a good book to sixteenth-century Englishmen and –women! Aino Liira examines the communicative and text-organizing functions of paratexts in the translated version of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. Her material consists of both manuscripts and early printed editions, and one of her goals is to see what impact the change in medium had on paratextual features.

To be continued
Text by Aino Haataja

English – think of the possibilities

Posted on March 18, 2016 by elmava

We’ve pretty much all studied the English language for many years already in our lives before making decisions about third level education. That English is a whole different beast than the one that’s studied in universities. Earlier you’ve simply studied how to use the language. When studying English at a university, you will get the chance to see the power of language up close.

You can take up the quest of learning the intricacies of literature and how it affects the reader. You can critically analyse media texts and through them power structures prevalent in society. You can see for yourself how the English language came about through its infancy to the present lingua franca and how the history is funneled to the present day. You will have the chance to study simply how the language itself is constructed. Perhaps you will want to delve in to the peculiar process of translation, where the diversity of different cultures and languages will become apparent and you will see why language is such a strong identity builder. Naturally, you can also learn the specifics of teaching a language to others, how language acquisition works, why language is such a special human feature, and how its best transferred to others for the benefit of us all.

While having the chance to do all this, you will also have a chance to join the merriest bunch of people out there that makes all the aforementioned studying just that much more fun. I’m of course talking about the student organization for English students in the University of Turku – Anglica. Anglica is a very open, welcoming and active organization that organizes a variety of events for students. These can include anything like board game nights, movie nights, various sports events, sitz and nightclub parties, visits to a theater and other cultural events as well as just casual hangouts. The best thing about these events is after all the people.

There seems to be a kind of a kindred spirit among Anglicans. We’re all different of course but it feels like there’s something similar about us all. That makes it easy to get on board and meet new people. I am one of the two members in the board of Anglica responsible for events and I can tell that I am already looking forward to seeing many new faces in the events to come next autumn.
Text and photo by Teemu Helenius

English students exploring a world of possibilities.

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

Happy Holidays!

Posted on December 18, 2014 by elmava

I would like to wish all our students and staff a very relaxing Christmas break and rewarding New Year.

Joel Kuortti
Professor, Head of English Department
Head of School of Languages and Translation studies

EnglanTY

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

Category Archives: Studies