English Language and Literature – Research
Staff and emeriti
Adam Borch (postdoc researcher)is a literary scholar specializing in the relationship between literature, mobilities and transport history. He is a post-doctoral researcher in the project Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities (RAILIMAGE).
Izabela Czerniak’s (university lecturer) research interests are in (socio-)historical linguistics (especially historical syntax), corpus linguistics, language variation and change, dialectology, contact-induced effects, lexical/semantic changes. Her postdoctoral research on the new face of relativisation strategy in the English language derives from the ideas explored in her PhD study on word order change in Early English (Open Access).
Debopam Das (research leader) specialises in discourse studies, corpus linguistics, and lexicography. His research concentrates on topics in discourse and pragmatics, such as discourse structure, discourse relations, and discourse signals. His current work focuses on the use of English relative clauses in learner corpora.
Jason Finch (professor, head of subject) researches spatial literary studies, especially modern city literature (London, the slum, urban peripheries, second cities). Jason leads the project Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities (2024–27).
Martin Gill’s (senior University Lecturer) research interests are in sociolinguistics, particularly issues relating to language, identity and authenticity/authentication, computer-mediated communication, and British social and cultural studies
Zeynep Henriques Correia (postdoc researcher) is a mobilities scholar researching spatial (im)mobilities and their representations, with a foundation in critical urban theory and critical realist
Anthony Johnson‘s (professor emeritus) research areas include Early Modern literature (especially Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, eirenicism and community making); interart studies, cultural imagology (especially poetry and architecture, literature and music, interdisciplinary cross-currents in Irish poetry); and the Digital Humanities. He is also an editor and Board member of the Oxford University Press initiative, The Complete Works of James Shirley. Leader of the project Digital Orationes and one of the founders of the project The Time Machine. Se www.abo.fi/projekt/harvesting-the-iconosphere/
Andreas Lehtinen‘s (university lecturer) research interests include phenomenology, history, biography, secularism, religion, ideology and the relationship of all of these areas to the process of reading poetry.
Loukia Lindholm’s (university lecturer) research areas are digital discourse analysis, digital pragmatics, and multimodality. Her work focuses on digital participatory spaces, specifically advice discourse, storytelling, metalinguistic and metapragmatic commentary, food discourse, identity construction, and relational work. She is also a co-coordinator of the AFinLA Digital Discourse and Interaction Research Network.
Roger D. Sell (professor emeritus)
Olli Silvennoinen’s (university lecturer) main research areas are corpus linguistics and linguistic typology. His research interests include negative constructions, clause combining, temporal adverbials as well as methodological and theoretical issues in usage-based approaches to language.
Tuija Virtanen-Ulfhielm’s, (professor emerita) current research focuses on the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication in English.
Brita Wårvik’s (professor emerita) research is in historical text and discourse linguistics, focusing on discourse markers and connectives, particularly in Old English narrative discourse.
Doctoral researchers
Meredith Brown, Conventions and Humour in the Works of Frances Burney
Hassan Butt, The Politics of Safety and Trauma in Post 9/11 Pakistani Urban Fiction
Aino Malmivirta, The Changing Field of Stative Possessive Verb Constructions in North American English
Kevin Wolke, Late Modernist Existentialism: Absurdity, Corporeality, and Mysticism in Henry Miller and Hubert Selby Jr.
Affiliated researchers
Aino Haataja
Nirali Joshi
Elizabeth Marsden’s research interests are primarily in pragmatics, especially those related to how computer mediated communication is managed. Her research is primarily focused on relational work, multimodality, in-group behaviours and memetic practices.
Joanna Nylund, Through Ancient Spheres: Mythology, ‘True Myth’ and Medieval Worldview in C.S. Lewis’s Science-Fiction Trilogy
Ann Tso’s research concerns popular re-imaginings of world cities, particularly theories of world-making and alternate histories. Her short monograph, The Literary Psychogeography of London, was recently published as an instalment in the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Urban Series.
Projects
ICLE+30, International Corpus of English thirty years after
RAILIMAGE, Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities
Earlier Projects
BATMAT – A corpus of BA Theses and MA Theses completed in the department between 1972 and 2016 (topic areas: linguistics, literature, and society)
ICLE – The International Corpus of Learner English
PUTSPACE
Interdisciplinary HERA Project on Cultures of Public Transport in Europe (2019–22)
Research seminars
SPREMI (Språkvetenskapliga forskarseminariet) – the joint research seminar for all language subjects at Åbo Akademi University. The meetings are on Thursdays 3-5 pm every second week.
PREMIS (Post-graduate Research in English: Multimodal and Interdisciplinary Studies) – a literary and cultural seminar, which focuses on promoting post-graduate research by concentrating on new developments in literature. The seminar appreciates multi-modal, interdisciplinary or multi-cultural input from researchers in related areas.