Fields of expertise
Päivi Pahta, PhD, is Dean of the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University in 2019-2023. Prior to this, she worked as Dean of the Faculty of Communication Sciences, and Dean of the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the former University of Tampere. She is Professor of English at Tampere since 2007 (on leave of absence since 2016). Her PhD is in English Philology (University of Helsinki 1998). She has worked as Research Fellow, Professor of English Language/Linguistics, and Research Professor of Multilingualism in four universities (Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Tampere, Wien). She has over 30 years’ experience of working in various capacities in higher education communities and ambitious research organizations, including Centres of Excellence and Institutes for Advanced Study. She has extensive networks and is regularly involved in the organization and evaluation of international scholarly activities. She is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
As a researcher, Pahta’s key areas of interest are related to how language works in meaning-making practices in various social and communicative contexts, with a specific focus on multilingualism; special languages, esp. scientific writing; and digitally-enhanced methodologies, esp. corpus linguistics. Her peer-reviewed publications include 20 books or edited collections and over 100 research articles. Her most important publications take a historical or long-term diachronic view on language practices. Recent international co-publications include The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press 2016), Multilingual Practices in Language History: English and Beyond (de Gruyter 2018), Challenging the Myth of Monolingual Corpora (Brill 2018) and Corpus Approaches into World Englishes and Language Contrasts (OA 2019). Her most recent PI role was leading an Academy of Finland funded research consortium of Tampere and Helsinki Universities (2016-2020, Democratization, Mediatization and Language Practices in Britain, 1700-1950).