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

  Minnigulova A., Protopova M., Dragoy O. et al.

  Atypical Social Behavior is Predicted by Overconnectivity Between Salience and Default Mode Networks in Autism Spectrum Disorder

  As Default Mode and Salience networks (DMN, SN) contribute to social behavior and switching between inner and outer attention, they are believed to function and develop differently in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, it remains unclear what alterations of their interactivity are connected to certain autistic traits and how age influences these networks’ maturing. Behavioral (social responsiveness, executive functions and communication skills) and resting-state functional connectivity (FC) data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange were analyzed comprising individuals with ASD (n = 144) and healthy controls (n = 99). We compared FC between the groups investigating DMN and SN separately and in combination. Finally, we assessed FC-behavior links in the ASD group and age effects on FC across these networks in both samples. Individuals with ASD exhibited increased FC between DMN and SN but decreased one within DMN compared to the control group. FC between right insular and medial prefrontal cortices predicted more severe social responsiveness impairments in ASD but there were no significant associations with executive functions nor adaptive behavior. Additionally, DMN and SN matured in ASD with partly different patterns than in typical development. Our results replicated and expanded previous findings on DMN and SN pointing to robust differences within and between these networks in ASD and their contribution to autistic traits regarding social responsiveness.

  Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 2025.

• Book chapter

  Lukhovitskiy L.

  Hagiography of the Palaiologan period

  The chapter provides a reassessment of the two interpretative models used for the analysis of Palaeologan hagiography, the ‘old saints’ paradigm and the ‘metaphrasis’ paradigm. After a concise description of the sources, the argument develops in three steps. Firstly, a distinction is drawn between the two dichotomies—‘old’ vs ‘new’ saints and ‘rewritings’ vs ‘original compositions’. The texts featuring the saints of the past are not necessarily ‘rewritings’; conversely, newly established cults might inspire multiple successive hagiographers to refine each other’s work. Secondly, four differences between the corpus in question and the Metaphrastic Menologion are discussed: 1. manuscript transmission in authorial collections (rather than Menologia); 2. occasional (rather than pre-meditated) character of the texts; 3. individual (instead of collective) authorship; 4. high diversity and depth of reworking techniques. Particular attention is drawn to the authorial personae of the two most idiosyncratic authors, Nikephoros Gregoras and Konstantinos Akropolites. Thirdly, in a more speculative vein, I propose to read Early Palaeologan hagiography as a specific type of historical literature, which allowed secular literati to make statements about their past in a free and psychologically persuasive way without the generic constraints of conventional history-writing

  In bk.: The Routledge Handbook of Rewriting in Byzantium. Routledge, 2025. Ch. 4.3.

• 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