Oleksandra Kuzmenko is a postgraduate student at the University of Münster and a member of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS). Her research examines personal naming in post-apocalyptic fictional worlds, as well as self-naming practices among gamers and the use of usernames in online communication. Her interests lie in literary onomastics, game studies, cognitive studies, and sociolinguistics. She co-organized the international conference “Language and Power” (University of Münster, 2023) and, under the coordination of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a seminar on post-apocalyptic discourse in the media (Berlin, 2024). In 2025, she was responsible for the Schülerakademie China “Geopolitics and Economy in Greater China: Structures and Developments,” an academic program for high school students. In addition to coordinating the program, she offered an extracurricular workshop on games, focusing on liminal spaces, dreamcore, analog horror, and China-related gaming trends.

Recent publications include:

Kuzmenko, O. 2025. “I don’t want to set the world on fire”: Faction choice strategy in Fallout: New Vegas (Onomastic and Semiotic Perspective). In: Onomastica Uralica 18, 47-69.

Kuzmenko, O. 2025. Establishing a post-apocalyptic worldview through names in video game localization. In: Conference proceedings of the 22nd Slovak Onomastic Conference, Trnava, September 5-7, 2022, 311-323.

Kuzmenko, O. 2024. Brahmin meat, Fat Man, Katzelmacher, or the cases of cultural and social (in)sensitivity in video gaming. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Onomastics “Name and Naming” (In)correctness in Onomastics, 875-888.