News

A professor from the School of Philology took part in the ‘Diversity Linguistics: Retrospect and Prospect’ conference, which took place in Leipzig from May 1st – 3rd, 2015.

One of the founders of formal semantics, Professor Barbara Partee of the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently celebrated an anniversary at the Higher School of Economics. For approximately 20 years, she has been teaching at various universities in Russia. This year, she took part in the Summer School on Pronouns: Syntax, Semantics, Processing, which was organized by the School of Linguistics at HSE. Professor Partee recently spoke with the HSE news service about why she considers the linguistics programme at HSE to be one of the best in Russia, as well as about the differences she sees between Russian and American students.

A degree in philosophy does not mean you have to remain a theoretician, and there’s a way to transform basic knowledge into not only a business, but money as well. HSE graduate Ilya Menzeleev, the co-founder of the hip-hop and soul label Hustle Flower, tells Success Builder how the Silver Age of Russian Poetry fits into rhythm and blues, why Russians should love ‘black’ music, and how Aristotle helps the music business.

HSE’s School of Linguistics, along with Samsung and the Leo Tolstoy State Museum, has developed a mobile application called ‘Living Pages,’ which offers users a new way of reading Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. The programme’s launch coincides with the Russia’s Year of Literature.

From June 11 – 12, 2015, Natalia Samutina and Boris Stepanov, leading research fellows at the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, took part in an international conference ‘Past the “Post-”: Theorizing the Post-Post-Soviet via (New) Media and Popular Culture’, which was organized by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). They spoke on various aspects of cultural communication in the Russian internet.

The International Conference on Language Variation in Europe took place from May 27 – 29, 2015, in Leipzig, Germany. Anastasia shared her impressions of the event.

HSE has hosted the international academic conference ‘Europe, 1945: Liberation, Occupation, Retribution,’ during which historians, sociologists, and culturologists from various countries discussed the social, economic, military, political, and cultural phenomena caused by World War II. In an interview with the HSE News Service, the Director of HSE’s International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, Oleg Budnitskii, discusses the conference, its organizers, and its guests, and also talks about why it is important to study the human dimension of war.

The fourth HSE School of Cultural Studies Cultural Effects of Borders annual road trip passed through Rostov Oblast, Dagestan, Kalmykia and Chechnya. On the two week journey, students looked for regional cultural differences, talked to the local people and conducted their own research. On their return they talked to HSE News about the oldest city in the Russian Federation, local variations in women’s clothing and the taste of grilled ground squirrel.

On 1st to 3rd June, the remarkable Italian historian and one of the founders of microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg will give a series of open lectures at the HSE. Professor Ginzburg has been invited to Moscow by the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI). His translator, Professor at the School of Philosophy, Sergey Kozlov spoke to the HSE News Service about how he was inspired to translate Ginzburg’s work into Russian which led to them becoming firm friends.

Two HSE students have won the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, founded by Google to support women studying computer technology. The scholarship is awarded for academic achievement, leadership qualities and interest in computer sciences.