News

From October 7 - November 12, 2016 a school for undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students organized by the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences was held in Germany. The school was dedicated to issues of memorialization and commemorating victims of terror and was led by the Centre’s Director Oleg Budnitskii. The trip was organized with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

Daniil Alexeevsky, doctoral student in Philology, presented the final part of his thesis on the development of a large electronic lexical database of the Russian language, similar to Princeton’s Wordnet.

Neurolinguistics laboratory held an open science lecture "Aphasia: speech disorders in brain damage". The lecture was intended for everyone and did not require prior knowledge.

On October 21, the HSE Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities hosted a lecture entitled ‘Classics in the Modern Age: Online Opera Fans Battle for the Enigmatic Russian Soul’. Delivered by Emily Erken, Lecturer of Musicology at The Ohio State University’s School of Music, her lecture covered the peculiarities of Runet contributors in their reactions to contemporary productions of classic operas. Among other topics, her lecture addressed how Russians today are seeking to rethink the moral identity of the country in which they live and how representatives from a number of cultural groups present their current views as a natural development of the national heritage.

Oleg Morozov, junior research fellow of IGITI, published a new working paper "Wilhelm von Humboldt and Berlin University: a New Look at the Origin of the Humboldt Myth." The paper challenges the established view that the Humboldt Myth was constructed during the celebration of the centenary of Berlin University in 1910. The paper concludes that the myth originated from the works by philosopher and pedagogue Friedrich Paulsen before the centenary whose ideas were later developed by his student Eduard Spranger.

On October 21, Emily Alane Erken (PhD, Lecturer at School of Music, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio) presented a paper  “The Classic in the Contemporary: Opera Fans’ Online War for Russia’s Soul”  on the Research Center for Contemporary Culture Academic Seminar.

Today computer and corpora technologies play an important role in language studies and language learning along with traditional methods of analysis. New corpora resources and software for language analysis are regularly developed. Experts from Russia, CIS and other countries discussed the latest achievements in this field at the international conference ‘Corpus Technologies, Digital Humanities and Modern Research’.

On October 5-8, 2016, the autumn school and international academic conference "And the Word Became Garden: Conception and Image in the History of the Landscape Culture" took place at HSE. The first day began with a presentation of Boris Sokolov's project "A Russian Poliphilus (1499-2017)", a lecture by Massimo Venturi Ferriolo "Burden of Existence: to the Idea of the Endless Landscape," and a presentation of multimedia project by Ulrich Gehmann "Ideal Spaces" (Biennale Venezia – 2016, GAAF Award – 2016).

Is it possible to learn a new language well enough in just two weeks to conduct linguistic research on it? This is an entirely standard practice for linguists, according to Sasha Kozhukhar and Liza Vostokova, both students in the Linguistic Theory and Language Description master’s programme. This past summer, Sasha and Liza went on an expedition to Guatemala to study Kaqchikel, an indigenous Mayan language.

The conference was held this year in Venice, Italy, on September 26th-29th.