Season's Greetings from Head of School of History

The year of 2014 was the time of many new and promising developments in the field of history at HSE in St. Petersburg:

We admitted the third cohort of undergraduate students in history and were ranked 10th in the country-wide ranking of history programmes by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation in just two years! In this regard, I would like to extend the words of appreciation to the entire faculty and Marina Brudastova, our registrar and the living spirit of the department.

We developed an international MA programme in history 'Usable Pasts: Applied and Interdisciplinary History' and are looking forward to the first admission to the programme in summer of 2015. This new MA would not be possible without the tireless work of Julia Lajus, Adrian Selin, and Elena Kochetkova among others.

We opened a DAAD long term associate professorship at the department. Dr. Dietmar Wulff won the DAAD competition for this chair and became the DAAD associate professor in history at the department of history at HSE in St. Petersburg. It is the third position of DAAD long-term associate professorship in Russia. We are proud to receive such recognitionfrom the respected German academic organization and we welcome Dr. Wulff to our community. We also received the first international faculty appointee Dr. Nathan Marcus who teaches economic European history at the department and we received the first long-term visiting professor at the department Sergey Glebov (Smith and Amherst Colleges) who taught this year political and intellectual history of empire and colonialism to our undergraduate and graduate students.

The activities of the Center for Historical Research under the directorship of Adrian Selin were expanded into a new direction: this year we hosted three post-doctoral fellows and five international associate research fellows who contributed greatly to the research life at the department. We welcome Anton Kotenko, Gayle Lonergan, Tatiana Zaharchenko to our historical community in St. Petersburg.

The department also expanded through the national faculty searches.Marina Fedotova and Elena Kochetkova started to teach in undergraduate programmes of the campus. We also welcome our colleagues Sergey Fyodorov, Anastasia Palamarchuk, and Ekaterina Melnikova in part-time positions at the department.

We won the university competition for international research labs and projects and launched a project 'Comparative Historical Studies of Empire and Nationalism' under the directorship of Professor Ronald Suny (University of Michigan and HSE SPb). This is a valuable recognition of the research potential in history in St. Petersburg and we are looking forward to great benefits that this project will bring to our faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students.

The regular research seminar 'Boundaries of History' met 14 times (93% of the sessions were held in English). We also organized 3 research conferences and13 workshops (82% of them were international and were held in English). For the first time we together with our colleagues from Moscow and Perm organized an international student research conference 'From Huge Comparisons to Thick Descriptions: Historical Research and Interpretation' which was hosted in Pushkin and was a great success among undergraduate and graduate students.  This conference was made possible largely thanks to intellectual and organizational work by Ivan Sablin.

Faculty of the history department published extensively this year and contributed to various fields of the historical discipline. This year 36% of the faculty were recognized by the universityfor their research contributions and were awarded first, second, and third tier academic distinctions and additional 28% of the faculty were selected to the university programme 'Professional reserve.'

I genuinely congratulate my colleagues with achievements and wish all of us every success in the coming year of 2015. I also would like to take this opportunity to thank all our international partners whose contribution proved so crucial in the development of the department.Boundaries of history are manifold and exciting in the past but are even more breath-taking in the direction of the future!

 Alexander M. Semyonov