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

  Aliyev A.

  Defending Nihilism About Musical Works

  According to nihilism, musical works do not exist. Platonism, on the other hand, states that they do exist—qua abstract objects of some sort. Given that denying the existence of musical works is rather counterintuitive, it does not come as a surprise that nihilism is considerably less popular than platonism. This is not to say that among ontologists, no one prefers nihilism. But an overwhelming majority of them are on the platonist side. Is this situation justified? Presumably, the answer is “yes” only if platonism is more theoretically virtuous than nihilism. My goal in this paper is to show that under certain widely held methodological assumptions, the given condition is not satisfied: The theoretical merits of nihilism are, on balance, at least comparable to those of platonism. This result, if true, provides a powerful motivation to call into question the dominance of platonism, while adopting a more favorable attitude to nihilism.

  Philosophia. 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

  Konstantin Zaitsev.

  Exploring the Effectiveness of Methods for Persona Extraction

  The paper presents a study of methods for extracting information about dialogue participants and evaluating their performance in Russian. To train models for this task, the Multi-Session Chat dataset was translated into Russian using multiple translation models, resulting in improved data quality. A metric based on the F-score concept is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the extraction models. The metric uses a trained classifier to identify the dialogue participant to whom the persona belongs. Experiments were conducted on MBart, FRED-T5, Starling-7B, which is based on the Mistral, and Encoder2Encoder models. The results demonstrated that all models exhibited an insufficient level of recall in the persona extraction task. The incorporation of the NCE Loss improved the model's precision at the expense of its recall. Furthermore, increasing the model's size led to enhanced extraction of personas.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024