Human mobility is constantly on the rise. The world is getting smaller ‒ and bigger ‒ through the increased number of linguistic and cultural encounters. There is an ongoing need for more versatile and reform-oriented expertise in these encounters.
Here, at the School of Humanities, we offer an excellent opportunity to study languages and culture from a Bachelor’s degree to doctoral studies. Our research and education are diverse and international, and we encourage a multidisciplinary approach to studying how languages and cultures meet, generate meaning and affect our lives.
The School of Humanities constitutes part of the Philosophical Faculty.
105
Staff members (2024)
1,341
Degree students (2024)
100
Peer-reviewed publications (2024)
Studies
The School of Humanities offers high-quality education in Foreign Languages and Translation Studies, and Finnish Language, Cultural Research and Logopedics. We educate language teachers, translators, Speech therapists and various other experts in languages and cultures to work, for example, in research, media, non-profit organizations and businesses in both public and private sectors.
You can take advantage of the wide variety of academic subjects that we offer and, with the help of our student-centred guidance, compile a degree that suits your personality and gives you a competitive edge in the job market. You can complement your degree with courses and modules on offer at our own school or at any other school of the University of Eastern Finland. Our international exchange networks and three international Master’s degree programmes guarantee that you have plenty of opportunities for internationalisation.
In addition to our programmes taught in English (see below), we also offer a variety of degree programmes taught in Finnish. To learn more about our degree programmes, please visit our page in Finnish.
Doctoral programme and international Master's degree programmes
Research
Here, at the School of Humanities, we conduct state-of-the-art research in the profile area of cultural encounters, mobilities and borders. As an emerging field, we are developing digital humanities, but our main research priorities concentrate on contacts between languages and cultures, which is an extremely topical research area because of the constantly increasing cross-border mobility and interaction.
In digital humanities, we focus on the cultural study of technology and on language and translation technology. This is our response to the ever-increasing pace of technological development and the way it changes people’s lives. We are interested in the multidisciplinary opportunities that advancing technology has to offer for research.
The driving forces of our research are multidisciplinarity and the high social impact of its results.
Research areas
In our research, culture is understood in a wide sense as art and folk culture, popular and media culture, and above all, as a form of people’s everyday life. What is central to all of them are various encounters. For the researchers at the School, culture takes the form of different texts and performances in diverse media, sensual, disciplinary, and socio-cultural systems. In terms of method, cultures, their members and products are examined using different textual, ethnographic, and other field methods. The study of cultures is interdisciplinary and is based on international contacts and transnational networks.
At the School of Humanities, literature is explored across a range of disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, and various language subjects. The research encompasses both contemporary works and the historical canon, employing a broad definition of text that extends to literary culture, authorship, and literary history.
Methodologically, literary research at the UEF integrates perspectives from literary sociology, gender studies, postcolonialism, and narrative theory with fields such as digital humanities, mobility humanities, and cultural memory. This interdisciplinary approach is defined by a commitment to contextualising and historicising literary phenomena within the socio-cultural dynamics that shape literary life.
At the heart of language research, we find language contacts, multilingualism, regional and social variation of language, and language and its typical and aberrant development.
In the subject of Finnish, research focuses on regional dialects of Finnish and other forms of spoken language, as well as the Finnic languages, especially Karelian. The research topics include linguistic variation and change, syntax of spoken language, language contacts, language ideologies, and language attitudes.
In the field of English, we are internationally renowned in the study of World Englishes and English as a global language, with a focus on the use of English in multilingual environments and on structural variation in modern English. We also cross disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with, for example, computer science in the study of computational sociolinguistics.
In the field of Swedish language studies, our research has focused particularly on multilingualism, minority languages in Sweden, linguistic biographies, and the relationship between identity and language. In addition, we study the Swedish-speaking community in the Joensuu region at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Within the discipline of Russian, research focuses on East Slavic historical language contacts, autochthonous peoples of Russia and the status of their languages, Russian spoken in Finland and other Russian varieties outside Russia. Another research direction examines the use of Russian in media discourse.
In the field of general linguistics and language technology, acoustic research of both typical and atypical (pathological) speech and the application of statistical and machine learning methods to speech research are carried out, also partly in collaboration with computer science.
In the field of logopedics, research focuses on the developmental challenges of language in large original and registered materials in national and international collaboration, including cooperation with UEF's School of Computing. Research is also being conducted on multilingualism, children’s speech challenges, adult aphasia, and swallowing.
Research in translation studies at the School of Humanities is versatile and belongs to one of the university’s main strategic profile areas: cultural encounters, mobilities and borders. Translation-related questions are often investigated from a cognitive or sociological perspective, and the key areas include the various phenomena involved in translation process, translator’s competence and expertise, translation and ideology, translator training, and the status and working conditions of professional translators. Translation studies can also be combined with cognitive linguistics and contact linguistics, for example, when analyzing the transfer of linguistic messages in different translational contexts or scrutinizing such forms of non-professional translation as military or journalistic translation or the translation of endangered languages. Other important areas include corpus research and the study of translation technology especially with respect to translator training, translators’ work as well as the reception of translations.
Communication Studies explore communication as a social and cultural phenomenon whose significance continues to grow in an increasingly digital society. The field examines national, transnational, and international forms of communication and their impacts, recognizing that media trends, uses, and meanings continually cross cultural and national boundaries. From this perspective, communication is understood both as a global process and as a locally constructed practice shaped by social, economic, cultural, and political contexts.
Research in Communication Studies addresses themes such as affects, crises, conflicts, polarization, and populism, along with the broader communicative phenomena connected to them. A particular focus is placed on audiovisual communication—including social media videos, podcasts, film, and television—and on the role of visuality in shaping how meanings are produced and shared. The Communication Studies also examines artificial intelligence as a rapidly evolving dimension of communication, exploring its uses, ethical implications, cultural significance, and effects on the public sphere.
Communication Studies at UEF is fundamentally multidisciplinary and grounded in strong international collaboration. It brings together perspectives from the social sciences and humanities to understand how communication is formed, how it influences individuals and societies, and how it transforms alongside broader social processes.
Our research groups and projects
Working life cooperation
We collaborate in various ways with businesses and organizations. Cooperation provides the working life partner with contacts to the future experts of languages and cultures as well as new perspectives, knowledge, and solutions. We take the needs of the partner into account in all forms of co-operation, be it a part of a course, practical training or working life events. Cooperation is possible with all subjects of studies in the School of Humanities. Learn more about the forms of cooperation and join our working life network.
News and events
News
Events
Contact information
Please find a comprehensive list of staff members in UEF Connect, where you can also search people by name or key word.
University of Eastern Finland’s Student and Learning Services is responsible for providing general study-related administrative services for students and staff, as well as offer support for applicants.
Postal address
University of Eastern Finland
Philosophical Faculty
School of Humanities
P.O. Box 111, FI-80101
Finland
Visiting address
Yliopistokatu 4, Agora