Season's Greetings from Alexander Semyonov, Chair of the Department of History

Dear colleagues! I am happy to extend to you seasons’ greetings and wish you very happy and productive New Year!

I would like to highlight some of the most significant research and educational achievements in our field of history at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg in 2017!

The year of 2017 has been marked with the second graduation from the history undergraduate program. Four of our alumni – Lilya Bolyachevets, Maria Zimina, Alexander Korobeynikov, and Yana Kitaeva – entered the MA program in history at the Central European University in Budapest. Valentina Smirnova was admitted to the MA in history of the Humboldt University in Berlin. The recipient of the best alumna of the St-Petersburg campus award of 2016 Ksenia Litvinenko also became the best alumna of the MA program in History of CEU in 2017, the “face” of the MA in history of the CEU, and currently is a fellow at the Institute of Modern History at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Margarita Pavlova of the undergraduate program in history won the Golden HSE Silver Nestling award! We are proud with success of our students and alumni of the undergraduate program in history!     

This year we admitted a record number of students to the undergraduate program in history – 99 students total!! We welcome the freshmen class and wish them a fascinating journey through the intellectual labyrinths of history! Our special gratitude goes to all the professors who actively participated in recruitment to the program!

This year also saw the first ever graduation from the MA program “Usable Pasts.” The graduate of the program David Damtar was admitted to the doctoral program in history at the University of Oxford. Congratulations, David! I thank all the professors of the first History Master program in English in the history of Russia!

At the end of 2017 we graduated first ever doctoral students from the doctoral course at HSE SPb: Ekaterina Kalemeneva (dissertation supervisor Julia Lajus) and Konstantin Troyanovsky (dissertation supervisor Adrian Selin). We congratulate them and wish them timely and successful defense of their dissertations!

Thanks to the efforts of the department of history, the St. Petersburg campus of HSE launched a new minor program in social anthropology. The program is chaired by associate professor of the department of history Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. We hope to strengthen the interdisciplinary connections and nurture the union of history and anthropology!

In September we hosted the III International Summer School of the department of history with the supported by the DAAD “The Topography of the Imperial Power: Political and Cultural Space of St-Petersburg.” Twenty four participants from France, Switzerland, and Germany came to the school. The work of the school this year was supported by 10 volunteers from students of the undergraduate program in history. The academic head of the summer school associate professor Ditmar Wulff confirmed recently that the DAAD made a decision to give the supporting grant to the VI Summer School in 2018! Stay tuned to news about the school!

The processes of internationalization included various other activities: in summer of 2017 20 history majors went to the field research seminar on histories of empire at the Universities of Bonne, Leipzig, and Halle in Germany; six history majors attended the archival practicum at the University of Lublin in Poland. Together with Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and University of Regensburg the department of history and the MA program “Usable Pasts” held a joint summer school “Change in the Interdisciplinary Perspective.”

This year, the department has been joined by three new faculty members: assistant professor Alexander Reznik (Soviet history) and Felix Levin (medieval Britain), and professor Valery Dymshyts (Jewish history). Also, we welcome Dominic Martin as a postdoc research fellow to the Center for Historical Research.  

I would like to highlight the following publications by the faculty and research fellows of the Center for Historical Research: 

Adrian Selin “The Time of Troubles in the North-West in the Beginning of the XVII Century”
Alexander Semyonov “The New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia”
Evgeny Khvalkov “The Colonies of Genoa in the Black Sea Region: Evolution and Transformation”
Evgeny Anisimov “Peter I: Good or Evil for Russia?”
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov “Two Lenins: A Brief Anthropology of Time”

All those books have been already discussed or shall be discussed at the seminar “Boundaries of History”. This year we have had 20 seminars, including the seminar subseries “Contested Global History” with the help of our international partners. In our conference series we have had a joint workshop with Ab Imperio journal “Imperial Revolution 1917: Post-Imperial Political Imagination and Revolutionary Politics in the Context of Diversity.” The workshop was held within the research project “Living together. Questions of diversity and unity in contemporary Russia: historical legacy, modern state, and society” andwas generously underwritten by the Foundation for Support of Liberal Education.

We congratulate Elena Kochetkova with the successful defense of her Ph. D. dissertation "The Soviet Forestry Industry in the 1950s and 1960s: A Project of Modernization and Technology Transfer from Finland” at the University of Helsinki. Our appreciation goes to Evgeny Anisimov who has become the member of the Council on Science and Education under the President of the Russian Federation.

In 2017, the department was joined by the Sprachassistent Sebastian Rauball, who is running the Deutschen Sprachklub for everyone every Friday at the Promyshlennaya building. Also, this year, we had our first DAAD short-term assistant professor Felix Herrmann.

The year of the Revolution centenary was rich for the historical events. On behalf of the department of history and the Center for Historical Research, I thank all of you for your work and inspiration! Our special gratitude goes to our international partners that have supported us and collaborated with us in the past year. May the New Year bring new ideas, successes, and partnerships! Very happy New Year!

Alexander M. Semyonov, 

Professor, Chair, Department of History,
Director of the Center for Historical Research