On October 21, the HSE Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities hosted a lecture entitled ‘Classics in the Modern Age: Online Opera Fans Battle for the Enigmatic Russian Soul’. Delivered by Emily Erken, Lecturer of Musicology at The Ohio State University’s School of Music, her lecture covered the peculiarities of Runet contributors in their reactions to contemporary productions of classic operas. Among other topics, her lecture addressed how Russians today are seeking to rethink the moral identity of the country in which they live and how representatives from a number of cultural groups present their current views as a natural development of the national heritage.
HSE’s Faculty of Law is a partner of the Fulbright Scholar Programme and each year has the opportunity to host a Distinguished Chair in Sustainable Development. David Wirth, a Professor who teaches and supervises research at Boston College Law School, arrived at HSE in this capacity in September 2016. He has shared his research, teaching and collaboration plans for the upcoming academic year at HSE with The HSE Look bulletin.
On Monday, October 3, two professors of anthropology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – Heather Paxson and Stefan Helmreich – delivered a seminar for students of HSE St. Petersburg Master's programme in Applied and Interdisciplinary History. A presentation by Professor Paxson focused on how the microbiopolitics of cheese making in the U.S. presupposed and promoted industrial methods and standards and how in recent decades interest in producing and consuming artisanally made, raw-milk cheese has risen dramatically.
On October 10, the HSE School of Public Administration hosted its monthly discussion series. This month’s event is entitled ‘Stress Test for Public Finances – Policy-Responses to the Financial and Economic Crisis in the OECD’ and was led by Prof. Dr. Uwe Wagschal of the University of Freiburg (Germany). Professor Wagschal's talk focused on the consequences of massive monetary and fiscal stimulus for the public purse and will compare the fiscal packages in 28 OECD-countries aimed at combating an economic downturn following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
On September 16, the Centre for Cultural Sociology and Anthropology of Education (HSE Institute of Education) held a seminar entitled ‘Trajectories and Educational Choice’ that brought together experts to discuss a number of topics related to educational expansion and the relationship between schooling and economic development.
From September 25 till October 5 2016, Professor Dr Joachim Küpper of the Free University of Berlin will deliver a series of lectures on ‘Humanities and Conceptualization of Time at HSE Moscow. Joachim Küpper’s travel to HSE follows the university’s decision this past summer to join a key project run by the Dahlem Humanities Center at the Free University of Berlin called ‘The Thematic Network Principles of Cultural Dynamics’.
Stefan Helmreich, Professor and Elting E. Morison Chair in the Department of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be at HSE Moscow and HSE St Petersburg from September 25 – October 4, 2016 to deliver a series of lectures and lead a discussion on the politics of contemporary ocean science. He will also take part in the round table 'Soundscape in the Anthropology of Science and Art' during the Days of Ethnographic Cinema festival organized by the HSE School of Cultural Studies.
From September 23 to October 2, the HSE School of Philology (Faculty of Humanities) will host Susanna Witt, Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University (Sweden). During this time she will lecture at a conference on World Literature as a Soviet Project, as well as teach several lectures in the School of Philology.
What causes variation between languages, and what do they have in common? How is language embedded in our general cognitive system? These are some of the questions that Eric Reuland, Faculty Professor of Language and Cognition at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (OTS) (Utrecht University), will address in a lecture course entitled ‘Syntactic approaches to anaphora’ that will be held at HSE Moscow from September 12 till 22, 2016. Professor Reuland recently spoke with the HSE news service about his research interests, his upcoming visit to Moscow, and some books he recommends for those interested in gaining exposure to the field of linguistics.
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Leipzig in Germany, began her involvement with HSE when she started working with two young scholars – Christian Fröhlich, an Assistant Professor at HSE and a former PhD student of hers, and Rafael Mrowczynski, who has served as a DAAD-lecturer at HSE. Ahead of her upcoming visit to Moscow, where she will present her work on ‘Multiple Secularities’ and give a seminar on Qualitative Methods, Professor Wohlrab-Sahr spoke with the HSE news service about her work, her academic interests, and her views on the key attributes researchers need today.
