Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Pritula A.

  ʿAḇdīšōʿ of Gazarta: Patriarch, Poet and Scribe (Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity, vol. 39). Leiden–Boston, Brill, 2025.

  ʿAḇdīšōʿ of Gazarta: Patriarch, Poet and Scribe focuses on the literary legacy of the prominent East Syrian poet and churchman who lived in the 16th century. The role of ʿAḇdīšōʿ of Gazarta for East Syriac ecclesiastical poetry is significant. He was the second patriarch of the Chaldean Church and the founder of its literary tradition.
  
  This book also explores for the first time the manuscript autographs of ʿAḇdīšōʿ of Gazarta, previously unavailable to scholars. In addition, many of this author’s poetic texts are critically published and translated for the first time.

  
  
  

  Vol. 39. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2025.

• Article

  Boltunova E.

  The Funeral Ceremonies of Alexander I (1826): Hierarchical Representations of Imperial Space beyond the Capitals

  This article examines the ceremonial practices surrounding the burial and commemoration of Emperor Alexander I and their role in articulating hierarchical representations of imperial space. Alexander I died in November 1825 in Taganrog, more than one thousand miles from Saint Petersburg, and the transfer of his body to the imperial capital took several months. The funeral cortege travelled through provinces of southern and central Russia and passed through major cities, including Kharkov, Belgorod, Kursk, Tula, Moscow, and Novgorod, before reaching Saint Petersburg for the burial. One month later, Warsaw – the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, which had formed part of the Russian Empire since 1815 – hosted a symbolic funeral ceremony in the emperor’s honour. This article constitutes the first part of a two-part study that analyses how funeral rituals reflected differentiated perceptions of Russia’s imperial territories in the mid-1820s. It focuses specifically on ceremonial processions held outside the imperial capitals. The analysis  demonstrates that regional ceremonies avoided any explicit representation of local identity: organisers employed no regional symbols of authority, articulated no statements about local history, and made no attempt to visualise the territories in which the rituals took place. At the same time, the ceremonies consistently affirmed the unity of the Russian Empire and clearly marked the distinct constitutional status of the Kingdom of Poland. The article argues that these practices reveal a hierarchical vision of imperial space in which regions of Central Russia functioned as neutral settings for the performance of imperial sovereignty, rather than as subjects of representation in their own right.

  Новая и новейшая история. 2026. Vol. 70. No. 1 . P. 17-28.

• Book chapter

  Minov S.

  A Family Drama in Jericho: The Syriac Story of Ḥananya and Shmuni

  In bk.: ‘Brouria Has Spoken Wisely’: Studies in Christian Late Antiquity and Syriac Literature in Honor of Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2025. P. 211-230.

• 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