Research & Expertise

On September 23, the HSE School of Philological Studies launched the third season of its international academic workshop on ‘The 19^th-Century Russian Novel: Corpus, Poetics, Social Imaginary’. We talked to Alexey Vdovin, Associate Professor at the School of Philological Studies, about the workshop’s plans and international cooperation, as well as to Ani Kokobobo, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas, who opened this year’s workshop with her report ‘Strange Bedfellows – Leo Tolstoy and Andrea Dworkin’.

How can a small Russian research group become a world-famous scientific centre in less than a decade? A special edition of the Frontiers in Psychologyjournal devoted to increasing public awareness of neuroscience features an article about the HSE University Center for Language and Brain, including the successes and challenges of its early years.

This summer, the HSE Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences was reorganized to become the HSE Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Oleg Budnitskii, Doctor of Historical Sciences, head of the Centre and director of the Institute, talked to the HSE News Service about the new division.

Videos of talks by Pavel Naumov, Itala M. Loffredo D’Ottaviano and Natasha Alechina are available!

Less than a year ago, the Faculty of Humanities at HSE University launched four large-scale projects, bringing together representatives of different disciplines from different departments and campuses of the University. Their goals, content, staffing and expected results were presented at a meeting of the Rector’s Council. Other departments have been tasked with developing their own large-scale projects, which HSE University will be able to include in its application for the ‘Priority 2030’ programme.

Digital archives and electronic versions of manuscripts are essential to the work of modern-day philologists, linguists, and literary scholars. The possibilities that digitization opens up to researchers were the focus of the second international conference of early career researchers of Russian literature. The conference had the theme of ‘Text as DATA: The Manuscript in the Digital Space’ and was hosted by the HSE Faculty of Humanities.

On March 19-20, 2021, the 6th Annual Russian Comics Conference “The World of Comics” (Mir Komiksov) was held in online format, organized by the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies of the National Research University 'Higher School of Economics'.

Using 3D-modelling, researchers of HSE and the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) have restored and deciphered an ancient literary monument of North-Eastern Ancient Rus — inscriptions about the murder of Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky written in 1175–1176 on a wall of the cathedral in Pereslavl-Zalessky. The study was published in Slověne = Словѣне. International Journal of Slavic Studies.

Psycholinguists from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain found that when reading, people are not only able to predict specific words, but also words’ grammatical properties, which helps them to read faster. Researchers have also discovered that predictability of words and grammatical features can be successfully modelled with the use of neural networks. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

On February 9, the HSE International Laboratory 'Russia’s Regions in Historical Perspective' hosted Janet Hartley (London School of Economics), who presented her recent monograph The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River. The presentation was part of a joint lecture series between the Laboratory and The Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation. HSE news service spoke with Janet Hartley about her interest in Russia, her experience travelling and doing research in Russia, and the books she has written on Russia.