The Poletaev Readings, dedicated to the memory of Andrey Poletaev, one of the founders of the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (Russian acronym — IGITI), is a major annual event of the Institute. The event was set to mark its 10^th anniversary in 2020, but due to the pandemic, the anniversary forum has been postponed to 2021. In its place, the organizers have arranged the Poletaev Readings 9¾, which were held online. HSE News Service spoke with the event organizer and some of the participants.

HSE Rector Yaroslav Kuzminov has signed an order ‘On changes in working arrangements for HSE University staff due to the worsening situation with the spread of COVID-19.’

How to prepare a submission for the Student Research Paper Competition: advice from previous winners

HSE University Rector Yaroslav Kuzminov has welcomed first year students to HSE University. He told the newly enrolled students about the importance of wearing masks on campus, the autumn flu vaccination, as well as important changes in the educational process. The rector also congratulated them on starting their student life at HSE University.

Any student or 2020 graduate of a Russian or international university is eligible to take part in the Student Research Paper Competition. Papers can be submitted from September 1 to October 15. The competition has been held at HSE University since 2003.

Answers to your most important questions

The Russian Ministry of Education and Science has announced the results of a grant competition for big research projects. One of the winners is a project with HSE University participation: the creation of a next generation computational linguistic platform to digitally record the Russian language.

During this summer’s exams, HSE School of Foreign Languages and the Centre for Computational Educational Sciences launched a pilot project for the automated checking of student exams. Ekaterina Kolesnikova, Head of the School of Foreign Languages, Dmitry Abbakumov, Head of the Centre for Computational Educational Sciences, and Daria Kravchenko, Deputy Head of the centre, spoke about the project and its future prospects.

Anastasia Ugleva on the restructuring of the Faculty of Humanities

Maxim Miroshnichenko, research assistant at Center for History of Ideas and Sociology of Knowledge, has published the essay at the Internet-journal on contemporary culture and society knife.media.

Until four years ago there was no simple tool for linguists to mark a set of points on a map with different colors. A point corresponded to a language, and its color corresponded to a linguistic feature of the language. This inspired George Moroz, of HSE’s Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and School of Linguistics, to create a new software product that turned out to be very popular: lingtypology.

The coronavirus pandemic is transforming modern society, reviving old social practices and formulas such as the Russian ‘flat-car-dacha’ principle, while opening new technological frontiers and creating new cultural skills. Professor Vitaly Kurennoy, Head of HSE’s School of Cultural Studies, discusses these issues in an op-ed for Izvestiia. Read the full translation of the article below.

The portal “My Planet” published a popular science article by the director of the HSE Center for Language and Brain Olga Dragoy.

Svetlana Dorofeeva from HSE Center for Language and Brain made a report at the online conference on developmental dyslexia

On March 12, a seminar of IGITI Centre for University Studies was held. IGITI Chief Research Fellow and Professor of History at Indiana University Ben Eklof presented a paper "Seeing Like a State? Local Governance and State-Society Relations in Provincial Russia Through the Lens of the School". See the abstract.

At the end of February, the HSE IGITI Research Centre for Contemporary Culture hosted a roundtable entitled ‘Field Studies in Russia: A Country Familiar and Foreign’. Roundtable participants talked about field work methods and standards, research challenges, and ways to solve them. The participants also discussed the extent to which it is possible to apply international experiences and approaches to field work in Russia as well as ways to study Russia from within and without.

From a northern village to an academic article, or How many linguists do you need to describe variation in Russian dialect?

In February 2020, a new book by Vladimir Karlovich Kantor, head of the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue was published

On 12-13 February Jan Surman participated in a conference "Polish-German History. A New Historiographical Field and its Contribution to the History of Europe", which was organised in Paris by the German Historical Institute and the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

On 23 January 2020 the next session of the regular seminar “Christianity in the History of Medieval and Modern Europe” was held at the Centre for French-Russian Studies (Moscow). The seminars in the series are convened conjointly by the Centre for Medieval Studies, HSE, Centre for French-Russian Studies, and the Centre for Ukrainian and Belorussian Studies (Faculty of History, Moscow Lomonosov State University).