The project aims to (re)theorize tellability (a story’s worthiness of being told) as a translational category that characterizes all, not only verbal, narratives. By exploring how Western classical music becomes a tellable subject matter in drama and graphic literature (Adrienne Kennedy’s She Talks to Beethoven and Brandon Montclare, Frank Marraffino and various artists’ 2020 comic book The Final Symphony: A Beethoven Anthology, respectively) and by exposing a notorious 2007 film noire (Alexey Balabanov’s Gruz 200) as a suppressed adaptation of a scandalous 1931 American novel (William Faulkner’s Sanctuary), the project seeks to uncover the fundamental capacity of narrative for change (its translationality) across media and cultures.

The project considers the respective roles of pragmatic and prosodic factors in disambiguating scope-related semantic ambiguities, as in I did not invite all my distant relatives, which could mean either ‘I did not invite any of my distant relatives’ and ‘I invited only some of my distant relatives’, depending on the scopes of negation and universal quantifier. Traditionally, it has been assumed that negation scopes over focus, and in languages like Russian or English focus is prosodically marked. Therefore, one would expect that in oral speech, disambiguation is based on prosody. However, a corpus study of actual production demonstrates that there are no distinct prosodic patterns consistently associated with either wide or narrow scope readings. This leads one to hypothesize that speakers rely on other strategies for disambiguation. The project studies the respective contributions of pragmatic and prosodic factors in the production and comprehension of ambiguous sentences in a series of experiments. Currently, the Russian language experiments are finished and interpreted, English language experiments are ongoing, and we consider other potential languages to include in this cross-linguistic comparison.

Co-edited a book, called "Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations"(Routledge, 2022).

What is a mind? Can a machine like ChatGPT have a mind? And how would we know? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these timely questions. Its core idea is that mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires) are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we should be seen as merely speaking "as if" people or machines had certain inner states, such as beliefs or desires, in order to make sense of their behaviour.
This is the first book dedicated to exploring mental fictionalism. The editors are an international team consisting of Tamas Demeter (Corvinus University of Budapest), Ted Parent (Nazarbayev University), and Adam Toon (University of Exeter), who have curated contributions from established authors as well as up-and-coming scholars in this burgeoning field. The result reveals the exciting potential of a fictionalist approach to the mind, as well as the challenges it faces. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on foundational debates in the philosophy of mind, such as the nature of mental states and folk psychology, as well as hot topics in the field, such as embodied cognition and A.I.

Associate Professor Daniel Beben is involved in the project described here: https://dpul.princeton.edu/badakhshan_collection

Professor published a book: Russia’s Social Gospel: Orthodox Pastoral Activism in Famine, War, and Revolution.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022