About the Department

The Department of History at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg was founded in 2012. The overarching goals of the department are to systematically develop the fields of global, comparative, and transnational history as a potent tool for overcoming the limitations of national history canon, to foster interdisciplinary dialogue in the fields of social sciences and humanities, and to bring new public relevance to historical knowledge. The department mission includes the development of new types of historical undergraduate and graduate education in Russia as well as pioneering research in Russian historiography in dialogue with the global historical scholarship.

The department was founded together with the Center for Historical Research, which serves as a research division and hosts international associate research fellows and two advanced studies projects: 'The Construction of Political Space in Historic Empires: Comparative-Historical Analysis' and 'Historical Problems of Technological Modernization in Russia' («Конструирование политического пространства в исторических империях: сравнительно-исторический анализ» «Исторические проблемы технологической модернизации России»).

The institutional international research project 'Comparative Historical Studies of Empire and Nationalism,' supervised by Ronald G. Suny (University of Michigan and HSE), involves both faculty staff and graduate students of the school. Faculty staff are also involved in the undergraduate programme in History, the MA programme 'Usable Pasts: Applied and Interdisciplinary History', and in supervising doctoral research as part of a structured PhD programme in History. The department’s areas of research include: history of the empire, nationalism, and colonialism; environmental and technological history, urban history; early modern social and cultural history; intellectual history and history of science; digital humanities and GIS.

The department hosts the regular research seminar 'Boundaries of History' chaired by Prof. Alexander Semyonov.  The potent metaphor of the title of the seminar highlight its permanent discussion threads: 1) opportunities and potentialities of historical research across the boundaries of national history and beyond the research agenda of national historiographic canon; 2) the porous boundaries between the discipline of history and adjacent fields of social sciences and potentialities of the cross-disciplinary research agenda setting; 3) the imagined boundary between the past and the present and the relevance of historical knowledge for contemporary and future-oriented public and expert debate in modern societies;  4) the boundary between professional history and lay and public history. This seminar series comprises sessions with pre-circulated research papers both in English and Russian, as well as public lectures and debates.

The department recruits staff internationally, hosting visiting professorships and nuturing international partnerships with world renowned universities and research centers, including the University of Michigan, the University of Goettingen, and the Ludwig Maximilian University in Muenchen.

The results of 2014

The results of 2015

The results of 2016
The results of 2017
The results of 2018

Research Report 2017

Interview with the Chair of the Department of History About the Development of Historical Studies of the Russian Empire at the IV Russian-German Week of the Young Researchers (2014)

Interview About the Department of History with the Chair of the Department Alexander Semyonov «Whither New Imperial History? New Approaches to Russian History» (2016)

Basic presentation of the Department of History at the HSE in St. Petersburg-  Department of History.pptx

Video archive