Areas of expertise
Biography
I was appointed Professor of English at Turku in 2016 after acting in that position for 2014–2016. In 2013–2014, I worked as Professor of English at the University of Helsinki, and in 2010 as Substitute Professor (Lehrstuhlvertreter) in English and Book Studies at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. In 2010, I received funding from the Academy of Finland for an Academy Research Fellowship. During that period, I was also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, and at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. I received my PhD at the University of Turku in 2000 and held various research and administrative positions there in the 2000s, including two periods as postdoctoral researcher funded by the Academy of Finland. As part of my PhD project, I spent a year as a visiting graduate student at Oxford University (Wolfson College) in the mid-1990s.
Research
My research focuses on textual communication and linguistic variation in the past. I am interested in how written texts are transmitted, transformed and contextualised linguistically, materially and visually by their producers and consumers for different communicative purposes. My work is situated in philology and historical (discourse) linguistics, textual scholarship (codicology, bibliography, textual criticism) and book studies. The materials I have been working on include especially late medieval and early modern English religious texts and legal documents. My recent research deals with the ’framing’ and ’packaging’ of early handwritten and printed texts by means of paratext and metadiscourse. I collaborate with Dr. Peter J. Grund (Yale University) on research into early colonial writing literacies, with a focus on the writers of the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. I am the PI of the Early Modern Graphic Literacies (EModGraL) research project, funded by the Adacemy of Finland for 2021-2025 (site of research: School of Languages and Translation Studies, University of Turku, decision number 340005).