Ivan Selivanov

My dissertation examines Cicero’s use of weapon terminology and military imagery in his political speeches. I compare individual uses of words in their historical context and in relation to Roman law, with a particular interest in passages that address political violence.

My published work considers metaphorical uses of weapon terms, including pugio and sica. Another paper examines the carrying of weapons in sacred spaces, drawing on evidence from Cicero’s speeches.

Since 2024, I have also worked on a project to translate Silius Italicus’ Punica into Russian with a commentary. My contribution concerns weapon terminology in the poem and modern scholarship on Silius Italicus.

I also study connections between entrepreneurs and joint-stock companies in the Russian Empire around 1914. Much of this work involves preparing data from historical sources. Identifying the people named in a document takes careful comparison: similar names may refer to different individuals.

We use language models to extract information from the sources, then check the data manually and standardise names before analysing the business networks. This work was presented at NetGraph2025 and at a seminar of the Laboratory for Applied Network Research at HSE University.