Areas of expertise
Functional Linguistics
Critical Discourse Studies
Ecolinguistics
Language and identity
Language and politics
Language and society
Language and the environment
Biography
I am a university lecturer at the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. Before coming to Turku, I taught courses at the University of Szeged, Hungary and the University of Eastern Finland and I was also employed as a researcher at the University of Helsinki. I completed my undergraduate training in Szeged, Hungary and my PhD at the University of Eastern Finland (2011). In addition to English linguistics, I have studied American Studies and Hungarian language and literature (including literary theory). I am a member of the International Sociological Association and the International Ecolinguistics Association and I am part of the executive team of the Centre for the Study of Language and Wellbeing of the University of Turku.
Teaching
I received my teacher's qualification in 2003. I have taught at various levels of education in Finland, including the secondary level, vocational education and adult education. I have part-time teaching experience at university level from 2004 onwards and I have taught full-time at the University of Turku since 2011. Currently I teach courses related to discourse linguistics and supervise MA and PhD theses.
At the University of Turku I taught or participated in teaching the following courses: Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Studies and Pragmatics, Academic Writing Skills 2, Academic Writing and Speaking, Theories of Language and Discourse, Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics, Code Switching, Language and Discourse Research Methods, Texts and Contexts I, Texts and Contexts II, Language and Discourse Thesis Seminar, Discourse & Philological Thesis Seminar and the Discourse PhD Colloquium. In 2016 and 2017 I was also responsible for organizing the meetings of the Discourse and Interaction group of the Utuling doctoral program in collaboration with Lotta Lehti and Prof. Marja-Liisa Helasvuo.
Research
My research interests are in the relationship of language and politics, language and institutional identities and currently in public, corporate and institutional discourses on sustainability.
Between years 2010 and 2011 I worked as a reseacher at the Network for European Studies of the University of Helsinki on the projects Language and Identity in the EU’s Multilingual Political System and Constructing Europeanness and the Schola Europaea: Educating Eurocrats versus Schooling the Next Generation of European Citizens? I am the author of 'The Eu Is Not Them, But Us!': The First Person Plural and the Articulation of Collective Identities in European Political Discourse (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) and also published e.g. on Europeanism and nationalism among EU civil servants; the europeanization of public education, the Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s discourse strategies; opinion formation in digital media, politics in science production and the role of discourse in the evasion of climate action.