Tag "history"

At the turn of the 20th century in Russia, public attitudes towards the creator of Sherlock Holmes went through changes even more dramatic than readers’ perceptions of the famous fictional detective. While initially op-ed writers and literary critics portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a British militarist, colonialist and 'tabloid novelist', later, reviewers lauded his 'versatile and powerful talent' and welcomed his interest in Russia, according to Maria Krivosheina , lecturer at the HSE School of Philology.

On April 2, Zbigniew Wojnowski discussed how late Soviet economic reforms affected East European cultural networks in a talk on pop music from stagnation to perestroika. His talk showed how the history of popular music provides a rich prism for understanding the last decades of state socialism and the advent of capitalism.

Today, we have moved from the political concept of panem et circenses (bread and circuses) to keep the masses happy to the dangers of culture driven by spectacle and politics driven by algorithms. Post-war theoreticians of the crowd had personal experience of fascism, and today contemporary artists are attempting to address similar problems. During the XX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, scheduled this year for April 9-12 at the Higher School of Economics, Sarah Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, will explore some of these issues in her presentation 'Culture and Emigration, Crowds and Power.'

Legally, the 1917 revolution solved the gender issue in the Russian academic community. The doors to the profession opened for women, but a ‘glass ceiling’ remained. Ekaterina Streltsova and Evgenia Dolgova studied who it affected and why. This study is the first to present a socio-demographic analysis of the female academic community in Moscow and Leningrad during the early Soviet era.

Dr Anna Whittington is currently a Research Fellow at The International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences through the end of August 2019. She recently spoke with the HSE News Service about her work on changes in Soviet-era language policy, her thoughts on life in Moscow and how the city has changed, and much more.

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and HSE University – St Petersburg launch the Paulsen Programme, funded by the Dr Frederik Paulsen Foundation, in order to support historians in Russia who have been working on the period from the mid 17th century to 1918.

The National Research University Higher School of Economics and its Center for Historical Research are launching a new research project “Post-imperial diversities – majority-minority relations in the transition from empires to nation-states” (2018-2020). Funded in the framework of the ERA.Net RUS program, the project is implemented by the consortium of HSE - St. Petersburg, the University of Eastern Finland, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at the University of Goettingen. Its overall aim is to study the constitutional politics of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity in the transition from empires to post-imperial arrangements following the Russian empire and the Soviet Union.

In July, an international network project involving the Centre for Historical Research Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History was granted the support of two international research funds.Julia Lajus, Head of the Laboratory, told HSE News Service what environmental and technology history is all about, and what role HSE researchers play in the Tensions of Europe international research network.

In this issue of The HSE Look, we would like to focus on three of the many seminar series which are held at HSE, and we are glad to present the interview with Alexander Semyonov about the seminar Boundaries of History at HSE St. Petersburg.

Alexandra Kolesnik, Junior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at HSE’s Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities recently completed her post graduate studies in History and successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled ‘Historical representations in British popular musical culture of the 1960-1980s’. Here, Alexandra talks about her research into modern pop-culture.