Hi, my name is Nikita Bezrukov. I am currently a Lecturer in Linguistics and Critical Writing at the Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Before (re)joining Penn, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Program in Linguistics at Princeton University, where I worked with Laura Kalin. My primary research interests lie at the intersection of syntactic and morphological theories, essentially the study of the building blocks of which words and sentences are composed — and how they get ordered, displaced, or copied by grammar. Before coming to Princeton, I earned my Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where I worked with David Embick, Rolf Noyer, and Martin Salzmann.
Another area of my research focuses on the theory of writing systems, which centers around mapping linguistic representations onto graphic elements. My current research projects involve formally modeling the combinatorics of writing systems using tools from theoretical linguistics, measuring the degree of featurality in a given writing system, and formalizing the Egyptian writing system. Additionally, I have a keen interest in the latest developments in Optical Character Recognition and Handwritten Character Recognition.
You can find more information about my work and interests on the Research page.
By the way, when I’m not doing linguistics, I’m listening to KayaKata.