About English Philology

The University of Oulu was founded in 1958, and during the four decades of its existence, it has established itself as one of the largest universities in Finland, with over 3,200 members of staff and attracting approximately 1,700 new students every year. The number of students in the University is 15,000 altogether, of which three quarters come from the two northernmost provinces of Finland, the provinces of Lapland and Oulu.

There are six faculties in the University: Education, Economics, Humanities, Medicine, Science, and Technology. The Department of English is the largest department within the Faculty of Humanities and in fact one of the largest in Finland. The Chair of English Philology at the University of Oulu was founded in 1965. The Department of English is located on the Linnanmaa campus, within easy reach from the centre of Oulu.

With a current staff of more than 25, the Department of English comprises teachers, researchers, project workers, and administrative and office personnel. Nearly 300 applicants sit the entrance exam every summer, of which the annual intake of students majoring in English is 38.

In response to developments within the discipline of English Philology itself as well as to those in the world outside the University, the unit offers a choice of courses of topical interest (many of which may be developed further at Master’s and Doctoral levels). With ‘multimodality’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’ as our watchwords, our aim is to provide students with new tools to help provide them with the flexibility which is needed for the contemporary world. In the field of applied linguistics, for example, emphasis is laid on the communicative and social use of language in multimedial contexts and on language contact. Linguistic, cultural and literary interests may also be combined through the unit’s interaction (at both research and undergraduate levels) with insights arising from the emergent fields of Imagology (image and identity studies) and the Digital Humanities. There is also an interdisciplinary programme – ‘Area Studies and the Anglophone World’ – which is arranged in co-operation with other units inside the University. One of its strands, the North American Studies programme, is organised in association with History and Literature, while another, the British Studies programme, brings together experts from our English, Economics, Art Studies and Anthropology units, as well as the Institute of Geosciences, and a number of visitors from British universities. English Philology has many links with domestic and foreign universities, and actively maintains these relations through student exchanges and teaching staff visits.

Complementing its general research focus on multimodality, language contact, applied linguistics, digital humanities, and literary imagology, the unit is involved in a number of specific research activities and projects. The most recent of these have been projects involving the collection of data on minority languages (‘LICHEN’, the DASS database), the interfacing of language and technology in vehicles (‘Talk and Drive’), and the digital transcription of unpublished Renaissance plays (the ‘Orationes’ project). Other research undertaken by staff and students consists of a variety of subjects including topics in English phonetics, translation, cultural studies, English, Irish and American literature, narrativity, contrastive studies, English for specific purposes and language teaching in general. For more detailed information, see our pages on "Research projects and activities".