Egle Köster (egle.koster@uef.fi)
The main focus of my current research is on the effects of drying trends on peatland vegetation: I study how plant traits and biomass allocation are changing due to climate induced water level drawdown. I address these drying trends on species, functional group and site level and study how these changes vary between different peatland types. For this, I compare experimentally drained peatland sites with pristine ones, and combine field observations with lab analyses and statistical techniques.
My career as a scientist has started in University of Tartu (Estonia), where I received my PhD in field of botany and mycology in 2010. After graduation I worked in University of Helsinki as a post-doctoral researcher, where I was involved in the research related to the effects of disturbances on the vegetation and carbon dynamics of the boreal forests, and studies on the effects of biochar amendment to the growth and quality of tree seedlings.
Karli Storm (karli.storm@uef.fi)
As a member of the three-person InBorder research team, Storm(-Närväinen) is interested in dissecting practices of border- and borderlander governance in democratic, semi-democratic, and authoritarian regimes. The InBorder research team, made up of P.I. Prof. Christofer Berglund (Malmö University, Sweden), Prof. Ketevan Bolkvadze (Lund University, Sweden), and Storm-Närväinen (UEF, KTL), and is charged with investigating official and unofficial practices of borderland governance across three paradigmatic cases–among Russians in Estonia’s Ida-Viru region, Armenians in Georgia’s Javakheti region, and among Talysh in Azerbaijan’s Lenkaran region. Storm-Närväinen is primarily occupied with the Georgian and Azerbaijani aspects of the study, although she is involved in aspects of the desk research phase of the Estonian case as well.
Storm(-Närväinen)’s prior research focused upon the politics of memory and identity among members of ethnic/national minority groups in Georgia, namely among the Georgian Azeri-Turks of the Kvemo Kartli border region. Her geographic area of expertise is the South Caucasus and its constituent states (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan), although her research interests have led her to undertake inquiries touching upon peoples and states in Russia and Central Asia as well. Storm-Närväinen is a native speaker of English and possesses varying levels of proficiency in the Azerbaijani, Finnish, Georgian, Kazakh, and Russian languages as well.
Larisa Leisiö (larisa.leisio@uef.fi)
I am a professor of Russian language at the University of Eastern Finland. My research interests include language contacts, Samoyedic languages, and non-standard varieties of Russian including colloquial Russian, Russian in contact with Finno-Ugric languages, and language use in media. My approach to language is typological and usage-based. I studied Russian-Finnish contact in the speech of Finland Russians, in particular code switching, word order in possessive noun phrases, gender integration of Finnish nouns, and the case of the direct object. I traced the impact of Northern Baltic Finnic influence in Old East Slavic and Old Russian. I am a specialist in Samoyedic (<Uralic) languages, in particular Nganasan. I conducted field work with Forest Finns in Sweden, Finland Russians, Inari Sámi, Estonian Old Believers, as well as Northern Samoyeds in Siberia: Nganasans, Forest Enets, Forest Nenets, and Tundra Nenets.
Michael Pace-Sigge (michael.pace-sigge@uef.fi)
BA Joint Hons English and German 1997; MA Directed Research, Lenition in Scouse voiceless plosives, 2003; PhD, Lexical Priming in Spoken English, 2010 (University of Liverpool).
‘Assessment of scientific proposals expert’, for ANEP (the Ministry of Science, Spain). Assistant editor of Journal of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (JCADS).
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5164-5242
Michael Pace-Sigge initially worked as university teacher at the University of Liverpool, UK from 2005 – 2012 and as university teacher at Liverpool Hope University 2007-08. In 2012 he was appointed Senior Lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland, where he continues to teach and do research. Beyond that, he has taught during Erasmus exchanges in Estonia, Italy, Lithuania, Spain, and Ukraine. Starting with an interest in Scouse (the accent of Liverpool) he moved from a phonetics MA to a corpus linguistics PhD. His particular interest lies in the Lexical Priming Theory (as can be seen by his 2013 and 2017 books). He also keeps finding further applications for corpus linguistics (as the 2015, 2018 and 2020 books attest). Of late, his interest has shifted to language applications in AI and Paul Hopper’s Emergent Grammar research.
Main publisher: Palgrave Macmillan. Also published with John Benjamins and Elsevier.
Link to the Pathways to Textuality, symposium in Honour of Michael Hoey Symposium: https://sites.uef.fi/pathwaystotextualitysymposium/
Select bibliography:
- Linked Noun Groups. Opposition and Expansion as Genre and Style Markers. 2020. Abingdon: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Spreading Activation, Lexical Priming and the Semantic Web. 2018. Abingdon: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Lexical Priming – Applications and Advances. 2017. Co-edited with K. J. Patterson Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Murphy, S., Culpeper, J., Gillings, M., & Pace-Sigge, M. 2020. What do students find difficult when they read Shakespeare? Problems and solutions. Language and Literature, 29(3), 302-326.
- A case study on some frequent concepts in works of poetry. 2019. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science Vol. 5.1, pp. 122-151.
Traumatized Borders
“Traumatized Borders: Reviving Subversive Narratives of B/Order, and Other” (TB) is a multidisciplinary research project which investigates oral and written trauma narratives related to various topographic and symbolic borders in Russian, Finnish, Estonian, Ukrainian, and North-American contexts. In the project, traumas are understood as universal, but yet culturally bound narratives and linguistic constructions. Borders, on the other hand, are understood as political and cultural constructions that create traumas and determines the meaning and significance of border related trauma narratives. Geopolitically, TB focuses on the contemporary EU-Russian border, former Soviet internal borders, and the historical Soviet Union border with the West, whose influence reaches even the North-American context. The study covers time period between the 1920s to the present day including some of the most significant historical events that have defined Russia’s and its neighbors’ topographic and symbolic borders.
In the project, methods provided by cultural studies, folklore research, cultural anthropology, literature research and linguistics are applied.
The project is funded by the Academy of Finland.