Research & Expertise

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.

Researchers trying to compare economic data of the USSR and capitalist countries face questions of the comprehensiveness, accessibility, and reliability of data on Soviet economic production and growth. At an online seminar hosted by the HSE University International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences, Assistant Professor Ilya Voskoboynikov (Faculty of Economic Sciences, HSE University) presented an overview of available approaches to studying the absolute size of the Soviet economy and its growth rates.

The Linguistic convergence laboratory organized an open course in English about the main area of ​​expertise of the laboratory - the languages ​​of the Nakh-Daghestanian (also known as East Caucasian) language family.

In October, Professor Holger Kusse, Leading Research Fellow of the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue lectured at the seminar ‘West and East: The Universalism of Culture’. We spoke with Holger Kusse about his work in Germany and Europe, his research, and his plans for the 2020-2021 academic year.

On October 2, 2020, Poletayev Readings 9¾ took place – annual conference of the Poletayev Institute for Humanitarian Historical and Theoretical Studies. We present a report by Elizaveta Lysenko, Alexander Mikhailovsky, and Ksenia Belik, and video recordings of the round table discussions.