Staff and Emeriti
Anthony Johnson‘s 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.
Brita Wårvik‘s 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 is Principal Investigator for Finland on the project “Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting” (PUTSPACE), funded by the ERC as part of the HERA joint research programme “Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe (2019 – 22). See www.putspace.eu.
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).
Lena Englund‘s research interests include Southern African literature and various forms of autobiographical writing.
Elizabeth Marsden‘s research interests are in pragmatics, especially those related to how human networks and linguistic practices are formed and develop. Her research is primarily focused on computer-mediated communication and (im)politeness studies.
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 installment in the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Urban Series.
Charlotte Stormbom, PhD, project researcher
Tuija Virtanen(-Ulfhielm)’s current research focuses on the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication in English (see e.g. Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, Adaptability in New Media and Face-work in Online Discourse).
Roger D. Sell, professor emeritus
Martin Gill’s research interests are in sociolinguistics, particularly issues relating to language, identity and authenticity/authentication, computer-mediated communication, and British social and cultural studies
PhD students
Adam Borch
Aino Haataja
Aleksandra Ianchenko, cotutelle PhD student
Andreas Lehtinen
Aino Malmivirta
Eva Norrman
Meeria Vesala
Kevin Wolke
Projects:
PUTSPACE
Interdisciplinary HERA Project on Cultures of Public Transport in Europe
Corpus Projects in Applied Linguistics:
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
Research seminars
SPREMI (Språkvetenskapliga forskarseminariet) – the joint research seminar for all language subjects at Åbo Akademi University. The meetings are on Thursdays 3-5 p m 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.