News

The Institute of Foreign Languages at the Faculty of Philology, in collaboration with the University of Western Macedonia (Greece), is organizing an international interdisciplinary conference titled “Nurturing Critical Minds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Education and the Workforce.” This event will occur at Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology, Lithuania, on 27–28 June 2024. The conference is also supported by various faculties of Vilnius University, including the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, the Faculty of Medicine, the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, and the Faculty of Philosophy.

The primary aim of the conference is to explore the development of critical thinking (CT), a crucial skill for university graduates in the 21st century. Critical thinking is essential for effective participation in society and success in professional careers. Educational institutions are tasked with equipping students with CT skills, which labor market institutions highly value for their ability to solve complex problems and offer innovative solutions. Consequently, university curricula must focus on developing both discipline-specific and general competencies.

CT development is a key learning outcome across various disciplines in university programs. Speaking about the reasons for organising this conference, the Director of the Institute of Foreign Languages, serving as Chair of the Conference Organizing and Scientific Committees Prof. Roma Kriaučiūnienė, emphasizes the importance of integrating general competencies into foreign language teaching and learning. This aligns with the Institute's research objectives, which include investigating how CT and general competencies are cultivated in language education. The conference was also inspired by the Institute's participation in the Erasmus+ project Think4Jobs, which addressed CT development in teacher education, foreign language teaching, economics, IT, and medicine.

Research by El Soufia and See (2019) highlights that explicit instruction of CT skills is most effective. Despite the emphasis on CT in higher education, these skills are often not taught systematically at the undergraduate level. The conference aims to raise educators' awareness of the need for explicit CT instruction and to explore the best methods for achieving this.

By adopting a holistic approach, the conference will examine the role of CT in various academic disciplines and its importance in the labor market. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference will bring together diverse perspectives on CT development in university education.

The Vice-Dean for Strategy and General Affairs of the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Vilnius University Prof. Jurgita Markevičiūtė underscores the importance of CT in data sciences: “In today's world, we are surrounded by a wealth of data, which is easy to manipulate and draw false conclusions from. Teaching statistics with critical thinking enables students to go beyond memorizing formulas and procedures. It develops their ability to analyze data, interpret results, and draw meaningful conclusions while adhering to ethical principles.”

The conference aims to present research on CT development across various university disciplines, share best practices, raise awareness about the importance of CT, and highlight exemplary practices. It will serve as a platform for educators, researchers, and labor market professionals to explore innovative strategies, share insights, and collaborate on integrating CT skills into educational curricula.

The event programme

Congratulations on defending your thesis and successfully completing your studies at the Faculty of Philology! Don't forget to pay the University and sign the Diploma Registration Register. More information about this >

The graduation ceremony will take place on 27 June, in two streams, for the graduates of the different programmes. The celebration will traditionally take place at St. John's Church at 10 am and will last until 3 pm. The estimated duration of each stream is 1,5-2 hours.

Facebook event >

Diplomas will be awarded to all in stream I from 10.00:

English Studies (Linguistics/Literature, Linguistics, Culture/Media Linguistics)
English Philology
Subject Languages (Law) (English/German)
Intermedia Literary Studies
Linguistics (applied/adjacent)
Lithuanian Philology
Lithuanian Philology and Estonian
Lithuanian Philology and Turkish
Anthropology of Literature and Culture
Polish Philology
Semiotics
Scandinavian Studies (Danish/Norwegian/Finnish and Swedish/Swedish)
Languages and Cultures of Northern Europe (Germanic/Scandinavian Studies (Norwegian)
German Philology.

For graduates of the following programmes.

In stream II, from 13.00, diplomas will be awarded to all:

English and other foreign languages (Spanish/Norwegian/French/Russian)
Spanish Philology
Italian Philology
Classical (Latin and Ancient Greek) Philology
Classical Studies
French Philology
Russian Studies (literature, linguistics, cultural/media linguistics)
Russian Philology
Translation (Italian/Latvian)
Translation (written/artistic translation).

For graduates of the following programmes.

The event will be photographed and the photos will be available on the Faculty's Facebook account.

Please also note that gowns are not a tradition of our University. You would look much nicer wearing university caps or even national dress. Caps can be purchased here > VU merchandise will also be sold during the celebrations.

The recommended dress code is formal.

Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology, has launched a new project "Redefining our understanding of being and language. Dialectical Games and Meanings of Being in Antiquity." The Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University is launching in 2024 the project "Redefining our understanding of being and language. Resetting our understanding of being and language. Dialectical games and the meanings of being in Antiquity.) NR. 10-036-T-0011. Dr. Luca Gili from the University of Quebec in Montreal will undertake a 24-month postdoctoral fellowship at Vilnius University under the supervision of Dr. Vilius Bartninkas, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philology. The fellowship will involve an original research project and researcher qualification.

The aim of the project is to fill a gap in the scholarly literature by broadly exploring dialectical practices in the context of metaphysical debates from Parmenides to Aristotle. Objectives: 1) to investigate the linguistic use of the verb "to be" in the 5th century BC, using modern technology to determine whether there is evidence of existential use of the verb; 2) to explore the possibility of a new reading of Parmenides 8, where the qualification of "to be" is not related to an implicit subject or predicate, but rather to the connection between subject and predicate, thus developing a new interpretation of Parmenides' ontology; 3) to analyse Plato's dialogues on "being" in the light of contemporary debates on language and the errors in the use of the verb "to be"; 4) to explore Aristotle's discovery of the "categories" in the context of dialectical debates on "being"; 5) to organise a seminar on the medieval understanding of "being" in the context of the analysis of dialectical copula.

The project will be implemented within the framework of the 2022-2030 Development Programme Manager of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania, under the Development Programme of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania, under the Progress Measure No.12-001-01-02- 01 "Strengthening the innovation ecosystems in the Science Centres", the activity "Supporting the Science and SME projects awarded the European Commission's quality label and the projects awarded the European Commission's Quality Label and the projects awarded with the European Research Council, the European Research Council, and the Dissemination of Knowledge and the ERA, which received positive marks, but which, due to a shortage of funding, did not receive European Commission financing".

The amount of funds available for the project is €158616.45.

Project implementation period: 1 May 2024 - 30 April 2026

The project is funded by the Economic Recovery and Resilience Plan "New Generation Lithuania".

You are cordially invited to the Faculty’s Literature Seminar "Manuel Lassala Sangermán: a Jesuit dramatist in the exile", which will be held in English, and will take place on Tuesday, 21 May, at 5 pm in Kazimieras Būga Auditorium. 

This time our speaker will be our colleague from the Centre for Comparative Literature Studies Dr María Sebastià-Sáez.

The abstract of the presentation:

The aim of this talk is to present Manuel Lassala Sangermán through some of his private letters. Lassala (1738-1806) is included in the group of expelled Jesuits who were banished from Spain by King Carlos III in 1767. Lassala was exiled in Italy and was considered a Hispanic-Italian author. During the exile, Lassala maintained an active correspondence with his mother, Inés Sangermán, along with other family and friends. Some of the letters addressed the French Revolution from the point of view of a noble family, in addition to discussing family matters. Furthermore, Lassala developed his literary career during his exile. Thus, also an overview of his neoclassic dramas will be provided.

Biographical note:

Dr María Sebastià-Sáez is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary, Cultural and Translation Studies at Vilnius University and researcher at the MotherNet project, in collaboration with Maynooth University (Ireland) and Uppsala University (Sweden). Her main research fields are Classical Reception, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Motherhood—specifically in non-motherhood and uncommon motherhood models in classical reception.

We are cordially inviting everybody to Jules Kelmann (University of Uppsala) seminar Tactical Motherhood: Ideas about Femininity, Nation and Cultural Transfer around 1800 in the Writings of Amalia von Helvig.

When: May 7, 13.00 /1 p.m.

Where:  Room 122.

Annotation:

With her biography shaped by mobility, and political and cultural changes, the German writer Amalia von Helvig, née Imhoff (1776-1831) is particularly suitable for examining the importance of gender and nationality as well as network contacts for the work and influence of women writers around 1800. Questions of nationality were notably actualised in relation to Helvig’s two visits to Sweden (1806–1810 and 1814–1816). Acting as a “cultural transmitter” (Petra Broomans) between Germany and Sweden, Helvig contributed actively to the reciprocal processes of nation building. In her many roles as a writer in different genres, literary agent and patron, reviewer and translator of Swedish authors, Helvig not only conveyed her image of the “North” to her German readership, but also was instrumental in shaping the way her Swedish acquaintances perceived Germany.

The interactions of gender, nation and authorship in Helvig's work were complex in their consequences: Helvig being a woman, a mother and an artist; a German living in Sweden; and a born aristocrat married to a bourgeois military officer, situated in fluctuating social, cultural and geographical milieus with their own aesthetic norms and ideals, has considerably shaped her work and its reception. However, Helvig and her works have not only been shaped by those intersections. Using the example of the topic of motherhood in her work, my talk will illustrate how Helvig tactically used the tension between the expectations in her different roles to shed light on contemporary norms, to question or confirm them, and even to subtly amend them. 

Jules Kielmann studied comparative literature with a focus in Scandinavian and German literature at Albert-Ludwig-University Freiburg, Germany. In 2023, she received her PhD in literature from Uppsala University. The dissertation Intersections: Gender, Nation and Authorship in the Work of Amalie von Helvig will be published at Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg later this year. From September 2024, Jules will continue her research at the Institute of German Literature at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany. 

This visit is a part of MotherNet project and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952366.

We invite you to learn more about Hungarian culture!

On 6th of May (Monday) 13:00-14:30 the topics of the online session will be Hungarian film industry and folklore of the 19th century presented by two other teachers of the Hungarian Visiting Lecturer Network. On 7th (Tuesday) 11:00-12:30, at Room 314B Márton Zsolnai will present an open introductory language class in person at the university. The language of the events is English, no Hungarian knowledge is required.

Everybody is cordially welcome to Prof. Nina Topintzi (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) seminar Beyond and above the segment: the phonology of onsets, on Wednesday, May 8th, 3 p.m., Room 314 B.

Nina Topintzi — Professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (theoretical and applied linguistics, English). Her areas of interest are syllable structure, prosody, relations between morphology and phonology, language typology in general. Author of numerous international publications (Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Phonology, Linguistic Inquiry, Glossa, Journal of Greek Linguistics), author of monographs published by Cambridge University Press.

Annotation:

The consonant­–vowel (CV) syllable is cross-linguistically the preferred syllable type. It consists of a nucleus (typically a vowel) and an onset—the consonant that precedes it. The phonology of onsets has been thoroughly investigated on the (sub)segmental level, regarding cluster phonotactics and co-occurrence restrictions. What has received much less attention is the phonology of onsets on the supra-segmental level. In fact, most standard theories (e.g. Hayes 1989) hold that onsets are prosodically inert and only rimes—the nucleus-coda sequences—are relevant to prosodic phenomena. In this talk, I show that this view is incorrect; drawing on my own work (Topintzi 2010, 2022; Topintzi & Davis 2017; Topintzi & Nevins 2017, a.o.), as well as much other research (Gordon 2005; Shinohara and Fujimoto 2011; Ryan 2014; Lubera 2024, a.o.), I present empirical evidence from a variety of languages and phenomena (including stress, compensatory lengthening, allomorphy, gemination and word minimality) that showcase the onset’s participation and contribution to suprasegmental phonology. I also discuss the implications for the typology of syllable and weight theories. 

References

• Gordon, Matthew. 2005. A perceptually-driven account of onset-sensitive stress. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23. 595–653.
• Hayes, Bruce. 1989. Compensatory lengthening in moraic phonology. Linguistic Inquiry 20. 253–306.
• Lubera, Amber. 2024. Sensitivity to complex onsets in Iron Ossetian. Phonological Data and Analysis 6(2). 1–40. https://doi.org/10.3765/PDA.V6ART2.71.
• Ryan, Kevin M. 2014. Onsets contribute to syllable weight: Statistical evidence from stress and meter. Language 90(2). 309–341. https://doi.org/http://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2014.0029.
• Shinohara, Shigeko & Masako Fujimoto. 2011. Moraicity of Initial Geminates in the Tedumuni Dialect of Okinawa. ICPhS 17. 1826–1829.
• Topintzi, Nina. 2010. Onsets: Suprasegmental and prosodic behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Topintzi, Nina. 2022. A new phonological analysis of geminates in Cypriot Greek. Journal of Greek linguistics 22(1). 36–71. https://doi.org/10.1163/15699846-02201002.
• Topintzi, Nina & Stuart Davis. 2017. On the weight of edge geminates. In Haruo Kubozono (ed.), The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants, 260–282. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Topintzi, Nina & Andrew Nevins. 2017. Moraic onsets in Arrernte. Phonology 34(3). 615–650. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675717000306.

Please find the List of Open Electives for the 2023/2024 Spring semester here.

These subjects can be chosen by 2-4 year BA students and MA students with the individual study plan instead of the electives suggested in your study programme.

More information can be found here>