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English Language and Literature – Research

English Language and Literature – Research

Staff and Emeriti

Brita Wårviks research is in historical text and discourse linguistics, focusing on discourse markers and connectives, particularly in Old English narrative discourse.

Jason Finch 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).

Debopam Das 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.

Olli Silvennoinens main research area is corpus linguistics. His research interests include negative constructions, clause combining, temporal adverbials as well as methodological and theoretical issues in usage-based approaches to language.

Izabela Czerniak’s 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).

Zeynep Henriques Correia

Nirali Joshi

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 (see, for instance, his Finland Academy funded ‘Digital Orationes’ project and his ‘Time Machine’ project: www.abo.fi/projekt/harvesting-the-iconosphere/). He is also an editor and Board member of the Oxford University Press initiative, The Complete Works of James Shirley.

Tuija Virtanen(-Ulfhielm)’s (professor emerita) current research focuses on the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication in English (see e.g. Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, Adaptability in New Media, Face-work in Online Discourse and The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy).

Roger D. Sell, professor emeritus

Martin Gills research interests are in sociolinguistics, particularly issues relating to language, identity and authenticity/authentication, computer-mediated communication, and British social and cultural studies

Doctoral researchers

Adam Borch,‘Publisher, in Masquerade’: Alexander Pope’s Dunciads and Anonymity in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Hassan Butt, The Politics of Safety and Trauma in Post 9/11 Pakistani Urban Fiction
Aino Haataja,From Private Happiness to Public Virtue: Contextualizing Worldliness in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction
Emma Kanckos
Andreas Lehtinen, Voids of the Absolute: Michael Symmons Roberts’s Poetry as Hegelian (Picture-)Thought
Aino Malmivirta,
The Changing Field of Stative Possessive Verb Constructions in North American English
Eva Norrman, Interfacing Anglophone and Finland Swedish: Studies in the Roles and Literary Milieux of Mary Stenbäck (née Longman, 1881–1926), Correspondent, Diarist, Travel Writer, Translator
Kevin Wolke, Late Modernist Existentialism: Absurdity, Corporeality, and Mysticism in Henry Miller and Hubert Selby Jr.

Affiliated researchers

Loukia Lindholm

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.

Ann Tsos 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

BATMATA 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.

 

Updated 29.1.2025