A year of remote learning – and cats 1

A year of remote learning – and cats
What a year it has been! This could easily be a long blog post about the effects of the pandemic on teaching and learning and what pedagogical solutions have been implemented and experimented with at the department, but today we have more important things to discuss. We need to talk about cats. This year has ...

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

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

A month in northern England

A month in northern England
The bleak midwinter is approaching, so isn’t a throwback to last spring a wonderful idea? At the end of April, I left Turku to spend a month in the north-east of England. I had visited Durham for two days in 2015, transcribing little bits of English surviving in some Latin manuscripts, and written in my ...

My Days as a Conference Assistant 1

The Finnish Society for the Study of English (FINSSE) held its eighth biannual conference here in Turku this summer. Having never attended a conference before, I leapt at the opportunity to work as an assistant at the event and get credits for my Master’s internship. I’m glad I did, for The FINSSE-8 conference, “What’s in ...

English – think of the possibilities

English – think of the possibilities
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 ...

Happy Holidays!

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

The Department by the River

The Department by the River
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 ...

To new beginnings!

To new beginnings!
A new term is beginning – for the new arrivals as well as for the returning students and staff. New acquaintances will be made, new faces will become familiar, and old faces will gain new features. There are many new teachers in the staff, who will inevitably bring new ideas with them. We look forward ...

More Poetry from Our Students

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

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 ...