PhD process ← EnglanTY

Tracing the Complicities of Colonial Violence

Oct

7

2024

On a warm Saturday morning, on 24 August 2024, a small audience gathered to celebrate Amin Beiranvand as he defended his doctoral dissertation Gendered Sexual Violence and Complicity: A Postcolonial Study of Selected Works by J. M. Coetzee. Professor Joel Kuortti acted as custos and adjunct professor John Stotesbury from the University of Eastern Finland ...

Doctoral researcher exploring the FINSSE-11 conference: What is the role of non-human animals when it comes to sustainability in English studies?

Aug

13

2024

FINSSE, the Finnish Society for the Study of English, was founded in 1998 “to advance university-level research and teaching in Finland of the English language, literatures in English and cultures of English-speaking peoples”. Biennially, a FINSSE conference is organised “to bring together university teachers, scholars and advanced students from all fields of English studies.” This ...

Unraveling the Complexities of Competence

Apr

8

2024

Earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to attend an eye-opening event on the “complexities of competence”, namely, Marja-Leena Niitemaa’s doctoral defense on Complexities of Competence: A Study on Finnish Upper-secondary Lexical Development and Use of L2 English. I had no idea what to expect, other than it was a formal event, and, I imagined, ...

So-Swiss-ticated in Zurich

May

31

2023

Switzerland. The home of cheese, chocolate, the Alps… and a bustling English Department at the University of Zurich with an overwhelmingly well-stocked library that I could have lived in for the entirety of my four-week stay and I still wouldn’t have even scratched the surface, and a staff that welcomed me with open arms? As ...

Finding the Right Answers in Fiction

Mar

16

2023

Nana Arjopalo gave an outstanding performance defending her doctoral dissertation Narrating Deliverance: The Literary Double in the Writing of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Bharati Mukherjee on Friday, February 24, 2023. The viva was a true celebration of literature and the impact it has on humanity. Professor Joel Kuortti testing the connection, picture and ...

A DOCTORATE will be given for the completion and defense of a dissertation

May

30

2022

Susanna Mäkinen defended her doctoral dissertation, Stability and variation in the genre of runaway slave notices in American newspapers 1704-1865, on Friday 20 May 2022. While the never-tiring doctoral researchers of the English department have produced quite a few dissertation and vivas to accompany them in the recent years, Susanna was the first one to ...

Defenses during Covid: Traditions and pandemics

Feb

7

2022

Sirkku Ruokkeinen defended her doctoral dissertation, Historical appraisal analysis: evaluation of the book in sixteenth-century England, on Saturday 4 December 2021. The defense is a culmination of years of work, and as such, often a stressful event. While the dissertation itself is naturally the focus of the years prior, the event itself has its own ...

Defending alchemy 1

Jun

2

2021

Doctor in spe Sara Norja defended her doctoral dissertation, Alchemy in the Vernacular: An Edition and Study of Early English Witnesses of The Mirror of Alchemy, on Thursday 27 May 2021. Here, she writes about the viva and the days leading up to it. Due to the pandemic the viva was on Zoom, so the ...

Translating multilingual texts

Feb

4

2020

Another PhD defence in just under two months! A number of doctoral candidates of the English Department are now finishing their research projects. On 24 January, it was Laura Ekberg’s big day. Laura’s research topic combines translation studies and literature and focuses on a phenomenon also studied in linguistics. As it happens, code-switching was at ...

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

Dec

17

2019

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 ...