The Faculty of Humanities was created on December 1, 2014. It trains instructors and researchers in the field of language and literature, as well as specialists in philosophy, history, and modern culture.
The main goal of the faculty is to teach students how to understand and analyse various cultural processes, employ current research strategies, and effectively put their knowledge into practice.
The faculty’s staff are leading Russian academics and practitioners from various cultural fields, as well as invited foreign specialists. Students receive a modern education in the humanities, as well as thorough language preparation, which allows them to find extensive professional opportunities upon graduation. Students are given the opportunity to conduct research and gain practical experience at major private and public establishments.
Our strengths:
1. Interdisciplinary approach
We study the humanities alongside other academic fields so that students can apply their skills in various areas.
2. International cooperation
We maintain active international ties, which allows students to undertake internships and study abroad, as well as broaden their outlook and cultural experiences.
3. Research
We encourage and support student participation in research projects. This gives them an opportunity to apply their knowledge in practice and make a contribution to the development of the humanities.
Our graduates pursue careers in public and commercial organisations and various types of mass media. They also implement their own media, cultural, social, and educational projects.
Publications
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Book
Problem Solving in Philosophy. How to Do Philosophy in the Age of Ultra-Intelligent AI
This open access book provides a method for philosophical problem solving, offering philosophers the tools to stay ahead of machine intelligence. Louis Vervoort argues that, with ultra-intelligent AI knocking at the door, philosophy can no longer rely solely on its ancient methodological toolkit. The proposed method is essentially the same as used in natural science, theoretical physics in particular, and aims at solving problems through theory-synthesis. The author shows by first case studies that current AI can already assist us in this task – a trend that will surely strengthen in the near future. After explaining the method in detail, the book proceeds by proposing unified solutions to classic problems of (analytic) philosophy, such as Gettier’s problem, the problem of induction, of causation, of the interpretation of probability, of free will. The author argues that these solutions maximise a quantitative measure of solidity, and that philosophy can now reach standards of certainty that are comparable to those of natural science. The book is written for professional philosophers, but avoids jargon, so it should also be accessible to laypeople and scientists.
Springer, 2026.
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Article
A corpus-driven approach to teaching academic Russian as a second language
In teaching a language for specific purposes (LSP), a lot of attention is traditionally paid to the lexicon, which often requires a corpus-based approach. The article describes the procedure of creating an academic word list for studying Russian as a second language (L2). It offers an effective way of collecting an academic phrase bank in a specific domain. The article demonstrates typical problems concerning Russian academic vocabulary and the ways of solving them. In this paper, we suggest a methodology for extracting academic vocabulary based on a corpus of up-to-date academic texts of different genres and authors. This study resulted in the creation of an academic word list of economic vocabulary containing about 900 content words. As another applied result, we also present a training platform for L2 academic Russian in the field of economics. The platform allows users not only to explore academic vocabulary in an authentic context, but also to practice it, with or without a teacher. It offers the words and multiword expressions that are the most characteristic in the collected corpus of economic texts. The article contributes both to the field of Russian corpus linguistics and to the teaching of Russian for specific purposes.
Russian linguistics. 2026. Vol. 50.
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Book chapter
Human-in-the-Loop Egyptology: A System for Ancient Egyptian Text Study
We present a prototype web-based human-in-the-loop system for studying Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts that integrates an image-to-text pipeline into an interactive workspace for iterative refinement. In a formative user study with Egyptologists and students, the system enabled faster work and higher-quality results than a manual workflow.
In bk.: CHI EA '26: Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2026. P. 1-5.
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Working paper
You shall know a piece by the company it keeps. Chess plays as a data for word2vec models
In this paper, I apply linguistic methods of analysis to non-linguistic data, chess plays, metaphorically equating one with the other and seeking analogies. Chess game notations are also a kind of text, and one can consider the records of moves or positions of pieces as words and statements in a certain language. In this article I show how word embeddings (word2vec) can work on chess game texts instead of natural language texts. I don't see how this representation of chess data can be used productively. It's unlikely that these vector models will help engines or people choose the best move. But in a purely academic sense, it's clear that such methods of information representation capture something important about the very nature of the game, which doesn't necessarily lead to a win.arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024