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
Happy Holidays!
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Tag Archives: students
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 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.
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 to that, too.
New courses will start, and new types of collaboration between departments will grow during the term. This is instigated especially by the introduction of a new type of syllabus in the Master’s studies, consisting of four study paths: Language Learning and Teaching Path, Translation and Interpreting Path, Language Specialist Path and Researcher Path (see the blog text of 7 March 2014). Nobody knows for sure what lies in future but I am confident that the result is something good and beneficial, worth all the while that was spent in creating the system.
With all these new aspects and people, at least one thing remains the same. That is the warm, lackadaisical yet academic atmosphere of the English Department. While we aim high in teaching and research, we do not forget the light side of life. And that is brought on board by all of you.
“It’s a very good thing, really. I’ll be seeing lots of new things, a lot of new creatures.” (Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan, 1959)
Joel Kuortti
Professor, Head of English Department
Head of School of Languages and Translation studies
Turku humanists.
Photo by Joel Kuortti
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 Potter
By Harri Jokinen
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 done, aspiring poets!
High, shelved, silent rows, timeworn
Heavy, dusty books, with delicate black letters on solemn pages
Old paper waiting, listening
Careful steps, hushed words, earnest young students
August room breathing beneath a dark ceiling
Columns soaring, serious white busts judging, smiling
In-between shaky ladders, paths to knowledge
By Hanna Yli-Paunu
The path to graduation is paved with… a new curriculum
‘OMG it’s happening again’ may have been many a teacher’s first thought last autumn when planning the new MA degree began at the School of Languages and Translation Studies. This is the third curricular reorganization in ten years, and everyone is worried about the time that planning always takes, which is time away from research and teaching, our primary occupations. After dozens of meetings, the principles of the new curriculum were unveiled on 28 February, 2014, to a full house – there were actually not enough seats in the lecture room for everyone interested in the plan. What, then, does this new regime mean for our students? The English Department has an excellent curriculum now, so what will the reform change in the near future?
Not to worry: for the majority of English students, few things will change much. At the end of your BA degree you still choose the Track which you follow in the Department, but you will also choose a Path within the School: either Language Learning, Research, Language Specialist or Translation (the names of the paths may still be modified). Just as before, you select two Track-foundation courses, ideally in your fourth year, and subsequently the methodology course and thesis seminar that match your interests, organized by the Literature, SLA, Discourse or Philological Track. The rest of the Advanced Studies you can fill with courses from your selected Track and Path, the major change from the current system being that you can also choose some courses, projects and book exams offered by teachers from other language departments.
For new translation students the revised MA degree will look quite different though: practically all teaching on translation and interpretation topics will be fitted into a two-year programme, which means you can fully immerse yourself in the world of international communication at the Master’s level and also get to work with teachers and students from other language departments in a multilingual environment.
Overall, it doesn’t look bad, this brave new degree. However, a lot of details will have to be sorted out in the next few weeks. We will provide more information through official channels later this spring, and the New Curriculum will kick in after the summer.
Janne Skaffari
Upcoming event: MA Thesis Symposium
11 March, 10-12
Lecture room X
The first MA Thesis Symposium of the English department was organised last year. Six speakers, from different Advanced Studies tracks, gave a ten-minute paper on their pro gradu projects. The audience consisted of students and staff members, and many good questions were answered after the presentations.
The second MA Thesis Symposium will take place on 11 March, 10-12, in Lecture room X. Five speakers from different tracks have been invited to introduce their thesis projects (a more detailed programme will be published later). This is a great opportunity to hear about very different thesis topics and methods, and will no doubt be very useful especially to those students starting their pro gradu project soon. The event also offers a chance for the speakers to practise giving a talk in front of a friendly audience.
Students and staff from all departments are warmly welcome!
Mixing and Switching
”Etkö voisi please auttaa tässä?”
”And then she was like, no ei se mitään.”
As language users – speakers, writers, listeners, readers – we are constantly surrounded by linguistic data, and some of the material we observe is bi- or multilingual. The examples above may not be authentic (as in ‘cited from a corpus of genuine conversation’), but they are certainly realistic (as in ‘I think I have heard something like this before, and not just once’). They exemplify code-switching, the use or two languages, dialects, language varieties or, more briefly, codes in a single communicative situation. People who know two or more languages are prone to code-switch on occasion.
The English Department offered a team-taught optional course on code-switching in the second half of the autumn semester, a unique enterprise bringing together eight teachers and researchers from the five tracks of the department. This ensured that the students were offered multiple viewpoints and approaches, ranging from written code-switching in medieval materials to multilingual practices in the EU to translations of postcolonial literature. One of the surprises offered in the lectures was that the use of students’ first language alongside their second or foreign language in the classroom also counts as code-switching, and that there are language classes in the world where the use of the first language is strictly forbidden – a feature not easily grasped by those who have learned English and other languages at Finnish schools.
The course was well received by the nearly forty students who attended the lecture series. The participants were asked to write a variety of short texts about code-switching during the course and also to report on their own multilingual communication and the language-mixing they observed around them. Many said that they had not realized until this semester that code-switching was so frequent and had so many functions, and that it was such a huge issue that the six weeks of teaching were not nearly enough for a thorough survey. Indeed, several students have already chosen code-switching topics for their BA projects to be able to carry on with koodinvaihto research.
Janne Skaffari
Our Literary Lady in London
I still often think of the hours spent reading for my MA dissertation in the English department seminar library in Juslenia in 2007-2008. At least in two distinct ways, those hours were to have a lasting influence on my life.
First of all, they installed in me the desire to do further research. I had spent the spring of 2007 as a visiting student at King’s College London, where the thought of doing a PhD had gradually started taking shape. When I began to express interest in academic career, the staff members at our department in Turku were brilliant, offering me support and invaluable guidance without which I would not be where I am today. At KCL, I had attended a course on Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and Proust had been close to my heart ever since I started reading the Recherche at the age of 16. Once I began to think about a prospective topic for my PhD, Proust kept cropping up in every context. I had studied French as my minor (partly in order to be able to read Proust in the original language) and finally decided to apply for a PhD position in the KCL French department. My proposal was successful and a scholarship from the Oskar Huttunen Foundation enabled me to take this leap and move to London in 2009.
The other major impact those hours in the library had was my research topic. While at the time (reading for my MA thesis on Wilde) it seemed as if the books transported me into another time and place, what has actually remained with me from those hours is the psycho-physical context of reading: I remember the light, the temperature, the humidity, the smell of books, my excitement, and the changing of the seasons outside the window – all this much more vividly than the actual contents of the books. This realisation gradually became the crux of my PhD thesis – the highly individualised and potentially deeply revelatory memories that the reading experience may encompass.
When I was finishing my PhD, I was approached by the Head of the French Department at Royal Holloway, University of London: due to staff migration, they needed someone to teach a module on Proust in the spring 2013. After a successful interview, I started as a visiting lecturer at RHUL and was consequently offered some more teaching in the Comparative Literature programme. I’m currently planning my first postdoctoral project on the imagery of breathing, and living in London has also given me a chance to pursue my other long-term passions as a free-lance photographer.
Still, with all the excitement London has to offer, sitting somewhere with a book in my hand continues to be one of my favourite pastimes. For over the years, Proust’s Narrator’s suggestion that reading offers us a gateway to our own reality by showing us the connection between our ‘immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them’ – that an hour of reading is ‘never merely an hour’ – has proven immensely true to me.
Dr Anna Orhanen
Visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London
(Student at the English Department in Turku 2002-2008; Assistant at the English Department in Turku 2008-2009)
Anna was also a member of a research group in the department jokingly named ‘the Literary Ladies’.
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 by the hackathons organized in the IT world, our department organized an MA thesis writing day, ‘Gradutalkoot’. The idea of this event was to give our thesis writers an opportunity to work on their thesis in an organized and goal-oriented manner. The event was coordinated by Elina Valovirta and Mari-Liisa Varila from the Department of English; Outi Paloposki and Ira Hansen from the Department also participated in the event.
The staff members and 11 thesis writers (from different Tracks) met on Friday 18 October at the Paasikivi room of the Main Library.
We began by setting individual goals for the day – for example, how many pages each participant would write. Passages from Neil Gaiman’s pep talk for NaNoWriMo writers were read aloud for inspiration. Leena Järveläinen from the University Library helped us with information retrieval issues; she also briefly introduced the new ResearchGuides service of the University Library. This service groups together various search tools and databases available via our library; we recommend taking a look!
We made good progress during the morning and did a brief round of situation reports before heading out to Assarin Ullakko for lunch. After lunch, the writing work continued in good spirits. We had a short coffee break — sponsored by the Department — in the afternoon to keep everybody awake and busy. We ended the successful working day with a debriefing session, where we assessed how we managed to reach the goals we set for ourselves and discussed the next stages of our projects.
Everyone felt that the event was successful; the next Gradutalkoot will be organised on 5 December, 9-14. Another event to look out for is the Thesis Symposium, where MA thesis writers from different Tracks and in different stages of their projects discuss their work. The first Thesis Symposium was held in Spring 2013, and we hope to organize the second one in Spring 2014. More information will be available later!
Mari-Liisa Varila
Happy thesis writers hard at work.