Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Chesnokova N., Wang S., Larsen K. W. et al.

  The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern Korea

  Korea is a historical region of prominence in the global political economy. Still, a comprehensive overview of its early modern era has yet to receive a book-length treatment in English. Comprising topical chapters written by 22 experts from 11 countries, The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern Korea presents an interdisciplinary survey of Korea’s politics, society, economy, and culture from the founding of the Chosŏn state (1392–1897) to 1873 when its political leadership began preparing for treaty relations with Imperial Japan, the United States, and other Western nations.

  Chosŏn mirrors shared historical patterns among literate sedentary societies of early modern Afro-Eurasia. Various long-term developments that shaped early modern Korea include the completion of centralized bureaucratic governance as codified in the State Administrative Code (Kyŏngguk taejŏn); the appearance of regular rural marketplaces facilitating transactions in an increasingly liberalized economy; continuity of an aristocracy (yangban) from the medieval period (Koryŏ: 918–1392); a decreasing correspondence between ascriptive status and socioeconomic class; and the state and the elite’s growing interest in encyclopedic knowledge and its dissemination while their monopoly on knowledge production weakened.

  This handbook provides historical context for readers wishing to know more than just the “Korea” that evokes K-pop or North Korea’s nuclear weapons, while Hyundai, Samsung, and other South Korean brands have gained visibility in everyday life. Interested English-speaking scholars, educators, students, and the general public without access to the large body of Korean-language works on Chosŏn will find this book a valuable critical introduction to early modern Korea.

  Routledge, 2025.

• Article

  Denisova V.

  Towards a Cognitive Distortion Conditional

  Cognitive distortions, systematic biases in thinking that lead to erroneous beliefs and emotional distress, are challenging to identify and address due to their extensive variability and context-dependent nature. This paper explores the limitations of traditional approaches, such as Beck’s cognitive model of depression, in consistently detecting these distortions across diverse therapeutic settings. This approach uses conditional statements to help reframe distorted thoughts. It is based on relevance theory, which emphasizes how context and cognitive effects play a crucial role in effective communication. By focusing on the pragmatic relationships within conditional statements, therapists may better understand and address distorted thinking patterns. This approach aligns with non-labeling strategies in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), fostering a more collaborative therapeutic process. The synthesis of conditional statements with relevance theory offers a structured framework for addressing cognitive distortions, potentially improving therapeutic interventions.

  Manuscrito. 2025.

• Book chapter

  Lyavdansky A.

  Neo-Aramaic Texts in the New Alphabet Published in the Soviet Union 1929-1938

  The purpose of this contribution is to present the corpus of the Neo-Aramaic Texts in the New Alphabet in its entirety, to summarise what has been done in the field and to demonstrate how the nascent digitized corpus of Christian Urmi in Latinized orthography may contribute to research into this idiom. To this end, a few orthographical, grammatical and lexical features are discussed: orthography; synharmonism (pharyngealization); classicisms in orthography, morphology and syntax; demonstrative pronouns; the qam qāṭəlle construction; serial verbs; lexicon.

  In bk.: Handbook of Neo-Aramaic. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025.

• Working paper

  Orekhov B.

  You shall know a piece by the company it keeps. Chess plays as a data for word2vec models

  In this paper, I apply linguistic methods of analysis to non-linguistic data, chess plays, metaphorically equating one with the other and seeking analogies. Chess game notations are also a kind of text, and one can consider the records of moves or positions of pieces as words and statements in a certain language. In this article I show how word embeddings (word2vec) can work on chess game texts instead of natural language texts. I don't see how this representation of chess data can be used productively. It's unlikely that these vector models will help engines or people choose the best move. But in a purely academic sense, it's clear that such methods of information representation capture something important about the very nature of the game, which doesn't necessarily lead to a win.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024