4th Uralic Winterschool 2016

From January 31st to February 6th 2016 the 4th Uralic Winterschool will take place in Tartu. Morning hours are devoted to a language class; after Khanty (Vienna 2013), Mari (Szeged 2014), and Saami (Munich 2015), the language of the 4th winterschool is Komi, taught by Nikolaj Kuznetsov and Gerson Klumpp. The afternoon hours are devoted to lectures and workshops: a lecture by Eva-Liina Asu-Garcia and Pärtel Lippus will inform on “Uralic phonetic studies: state-of-the-art”, and a lecture by Santeri Junttila on “Methods of etymology”. The workshops are on “Transcriptions, transliterations and orthographies of Uralic languages” (Jeremy Bradley, Gwen Janda, Elena Skribnik, and Johanna Laakso), and on “Information structure and Uralic syntax” (Elena Skribik and Gerson Klumpp). The Saturday is reserved for a colloquium in which advanced students present their research topics. Winter-school venue is the Veski auditorium in the main building (ph 139), and the working language of the winter-school is English.

The programme is part of an Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership project “InFUSE —Integration of Finno-Ugric Studies in Europe”. Project coordinator is the Institute for Finno-Ugric Studies at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich (Elena Skribnik), and besides Tartu (Gerson Klumpp) the other project partners are the Finno-Ugric institutes and departments at the universities of Turku (Sirkka Saarinen), Helsinki (Ulla-Maija Forsberg), Uppsala (Rogier Blokland), Szeged (Katalin Sipőcz), Vienna (Johanna Laakso), and Hamburg (Beáta Wagner-Nagy). The project runs over three years, and is financed by the European Union. The following winter-schools will be organized in Turku (2017) and Vienna (2018). In addition to the winter-schools the programme offers an e-learning course every semester—in spring 2017 there will be two, Kamas and Lexicology, and a workshop every summer—the 2017 workshop on lexicology will take place in Szeged. InFUSE is one out of 14 granted projects from more than 60 proposals in Germany.

The fundament of this Strategic Partnership is a long time cooperation of the consortium: intensive student exchange, joint preparation of teaching materials, joint research and publication projects as well as the International Winter-school of Finno-Ugric Studies. A central task of the consortium is the development of a joint curriculum, based on the ressources of the participating institutions. The winter-schools are thus accompanied by e-learning and blended learning courses which combine the advantages of virtual mobility with intensive study stays. In addition to language competences the students are taught theoretical and methodological problems of Finno-Ugric Studies by an international team of acknowledged experts. Facing the increased specialisation in sciences, a Strategic Partnership offers especially to small subjects like Finno-Ugric Studies access to a wider spectre of quality contents from all sub-disciplines of the field. In the long run the consortium plans to develop a joint master degree.

More information:
Gerson Klumpp, Professor of Finno-Ugric Languages, tel: 737 6537, e-mail: gerson.klumpp@ut.ee;
Triin Todesk, PhD student at the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics , tel: 51 977 238, e-mail: triin.todesk@ut.ee