News

On Wednesday 27 March, 15:00-16:00, A7 (Canada) Room Dr Davide Castiglione will present (in English) a database of verbal images (VILD) that is one of the outcomes of his post-doc project ‘From verbal to mental: images in poetic discourse’ (project No 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-19-0204). This database is an ongoing project and contains manually annotated verbal images from a variety of writers, making it possible to find unique or related images based on both contextual and stylistic information. 

You can also attend the event remotely: you will find the link, as well as additional information, here >>

This event will be of interest to scholars in comparative literature, linguistics, and practicing writers, amongst others. There will also be a chance to collaborate to the project. An article on the database is about to appear in the next issue of the Spectrum magazine. The event is co-organized with the Department of English Philology, English Studies Programme and ARKSI.

We invite you to a public lecture by Prof. Dr Loreta Vaicekauskienė who is a candidate for the academic position of Professor at the Faculty of Philology. The title of the lecture: Kaip parduodant produktą nuperkama ir kalba?

The lecture will be delivered in Lithuanian on March 28, 2024, 15:00-16:30, in K. Donelaičio room at the Faculty of Philology.

We cordially invite you to a public lecture by Prof Antoine Compagnon Literature and Innovation. The lecture will take place on Thursday, March 18 th, 3 p.m. at Room V. Krėvė.

Annotation. Is “innovation” a suitable, relevant term for speaking about literature? Innovation is a requisite for growth. The term is today inherent to the economy of growth – and it somehow jars with the arts, culture and literature. In companies and business as in macroeconomy, innovation is linked with what the economists call “creative destruction”. In the arts, we would rather keep, preserve, cherish the works of the past. We call this cultural heritage. The digital revolution seems to exacerbate the mismatch between literature and the modern imperative of innovation. Or doesn’t it? Are we in a quandary? This is the conundrum I will explore.

More about Antoine Compagnon

We invite you to participate in an international interdisciplinary conference “Nurturing Critical Minds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Education and the Workforce”. The conference will take place at Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology, Lithuania, on 27–28 June 2024.  The conference will also be held remotely.

The main theme of the conference is the development of students' critical thinking in multidisciplinary studies at university. The conference will also discuss how labour market institutions assess university graduates in terms of critical thinking and how students' critical thinking skills could be fostered during professional internships.

Key Conference Highlights: 

• Interdisciplinary Approach
• Educational Innovation
• Best Practice Sharing
• Research Presentations

We  welcome presentations in the following Panel Sessions:

• Panel session: Critical thinking development in Teacher training programmes
• Panel session: Critical thinking development in Foreign language teaching
• Panel session: Critical thinking development in Literary and Intercultural studies
• Panel session: Critical thinking development in Mathematics and IT studies
• Panel session: Critical thinking development in the studies of Economics
• Panel session: Critical thinking development in the studies of Medicine

The abstracts should be submitted at the conference website >>  by 25 April 2024.

For more information, please visit the conference website >> 

Plenary speakers:

• Inga Jončienė (Head of Business Development at Alliance for Recruitment)
• Sandra Kairė (Vilnius University, Lithuania)
• Adam Mastandrea (Vilnius University, Lithuania)
• Daiva Penkauskienė (Modern Didactics Center, Mykolas Romeris University, Lithuania)
• Dimitris Pnevmatikos (University of Western Macedonia, Greece)
• Luis Sebastião (University of Evora, Portugal)
• Alistair Starling (Co-Founder and Managing Director, European Diplomats, Germany)
• Erika Vaiginienė (Vilnius University, Lithuania)

Conference organisers: Institute of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University and Department of Primary Education and Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Western Macedonia.

The conference is organized in cooperation with the Faculties of Vilnius University:

• Faculty of Philosophy
• Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics
• Faculty of Medicine
• Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

We look forward to your participation at the conference! 

We cordially invite you to the Faculty’s Literature Seminar, which will be held in English, and will take place on Tuesday, 19 March, at 5 p.m. in Kazimieras Būga Auditorium.  This time our speaker will be the post-doctoral fellow of the Institute for Literary, Cultural and Translation Studies Dr Daria Semenova.

“This beautiful Crimea, this tragic Crimea”: the peninsula on the mental map of “sites of memory” in contemporary Ukrainian literature for children and young adults

Abstract: In the early 2000s, Ukrainian authors turned to entertaining and attention-grabbing potential of children’s detective stories and adventure fiction to familiarize their young readers with topics from Ukrainian history. This presentation will characterize the peculiar genre conglomerate in which detective plots gravitated around historic artefacts and places where notable historic events took place – thus promoting a mental map of the national space and a narrative of collective memory. The Crimean Peninsula was given a very peripheral place on this mental map, if any, before the occupation in 2014. The second part of the presentation shows how, paradoxically, Crimea and its indigenous inhabitants, Crimean Tatars, get centered in stories for children and young adults about national memory more often since the late 2010s. The final part will analyze how contemporary historic fiction for children inscribes events from the history of Crimean Tatars into the kaleidoscope of multi-cultural stories that took place on the territory of present-day Ukraine.

Daria Semenova is primarily interested in the potential of genre fiction to shape the readers’ understanding of the world and themselves. She obtained her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2023, with a dissertation entitled “At Home and Away: Community Belonging in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Adventure Fiction, 1918-1960.” The current presentation is part of her new research project dedicated to space and memory in Ukrainian fiction for children and young adults since independence, on which she is working as a post-doctoral fellow at Vilnius University.

Students and staff from the Arqus universities can now register for the eigth edition of the Arqus Café, which will run from 11^th March to 21^st June 2024

The Arqus Café is an online space where members of the Arqus universities can meet in small groups to practice and improve their language skills in a relaxed atmosphere. It’s a great opportunity for students and staff to expand their language and cultural knowledge informally together with other learners. All levels are welcome, but it works best when participants have a minimum of an A2 level. Please note that the cafés are not language courses.

The cafés take place once a week for one hour online via ZOOM. The tutors guiding the Arqus Café sessions are native-level speakers who have received training in leading language cafés.

This time we are offering cafés in:

• German
• English
• French
• Italian
• Khmer
• Lithuanian
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

In addition, we are now offering cafés at two different levels for some languages: beginner/intermediate (A2-B1) and intermediate/advanced (B2-C1).

Registration is now open and closes two weeks before the end of each language café.

Go here >> to find out more about the Arqus Café, the languages offered and the online registration process.

We are thrilled to announce the upcoming international conference for graduate students “English Studies 2024: Discourse and Society” that is due on May 6-7, 2024!

Organised by the ARKSI Institute  in partnership with Blaze Koneski Faculty of Philology (Skopje University, North Macedonia), we invite graduate students to contribute to the diverse dialogue in English Studies. The intersections between language, literature, culture, and society will be explored across a spectrum of thematic areas. More information about the speakers, call for papers, and submission guidelines at our conference website:  www.englishstudies-ds.flf.vu.lt.

The registration is open until March 18^th.

We invite you to a public lecture by Assoc. Prof. Dr Eglė Kačkutė who is a candidate for the academic position of Professor at the Faculty of Philology. The title of the lecture: Motinystė, mobilumas, migracija.

The lecture will be delivered in Lithuanian on March 19, 2024, 15:00-16:30, in K. Donelaičio room at the Faculty of Philology.