Professor Sirpa Leppänen, PhD

Sirpa Leppänen is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has directed several extensive research projects focusing on multilingualism in Finnish society, with a particular focus on English and Finnish. As part of the Center of Excellence in Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change, her research group conducted a nation-wide survey on the roles and meanings of, and attitudes to English in Finnish society, as well as investigated the uses and functions of English in various institutional, everyday and mediatized settings. Her publications include 8 books or edited collections and over 80 research articles. Her most recent work has focused on multilingualism and multimodality as sociolinguistic resources for identification, gender, belonging, and counterspeech in social media.