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

Dear colleagues, the end of the year is in sight, and I wish you Merry Seasonal Holidays and very successful New Year!

Let me also use occasion to share with you the highlights of the past year in the field of history at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.

In 2018 we opened the Affiliated Department of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography – Kunstkamera. Andrei Golovnyov, the director of Kunstkamera agreed to  head this new department at HSE in St. Petersburg. We are very much looking to cooperation with the oldest academic institution and museum in Russia!

In 2018, we partnered with the University of Turin for a new joint international doctoral program “Global History of Empires.” With the first doctoral students admitted to the program in October of 2018 this program has become the first joint international doctoral program at the Higher School of Economics. I am happy for our doctoral students in history of 2018 class who thanks to the initiative by the University of Turin will spend the spring semester of 2019 in Turin.  

According to the results of the 2018 university admission ranking, the undergraduate program in history was rated as one of the three best history programs in Russia. We welcome all the first year students and congratulate all of the faculty who teach in the program and think about ways of improving the undergraduate education in history!

In May and June of 2018 the Center for Historical Research hosted the international research summer school “Global history in the era of the empire, 1870–1920”, organized jointly with Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University. The school was attended by 25 graduate students from Russia, Germany, and the United States.

Our cooperation with German universities has been going strong through the entire year: in September we held the fourth international summer school "The Topography of Imperial Power" that was made possible with the generous support from the DAAD. Collaboration with the DAAD also continued in other areas: Suzanne Probst joined the faculty as a language assistant for the academic year, and Dr. Franziska Exeler from Free University of Berlin and University of Cambridge has visited in December as a visiting DAAD professor.

In October of 2018 the Center for Historical Research became an official partner of the London School of Economics within the Frederick Paulsen Program. The Paulsen Program’s goal is to support young scholars’ research in the field of Russian history before 1917. We are looking forward to the first workshop at the HSE in St. Petersburg within this program in June 2020.

In 2018 the Center for Historical Research entered into an international consortium with the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at the University of Goettingen. The collaborative research project “Post-Imperial Diversity” of the consortium was supported by the grant from the ERA.Net Rus Plus program. Leaders of the research teams of the consortium are: Professor Alexander Semyonov (HSE in St. Petersburg); Professor Matthias Koenig (University of Goettingen), and Professor Jeremy Smith (University of Eastern Finland).

In 2018 the Center for Historical Research took part in the organization and presentation of the newly established international professional award of Ab Imperio Quarterly for the best study in new imperial history and history of diversity in Northern Eurasia up to the late twentieth century. The recipients of the first Ab Imperio Award Choi Chatterjee and Krishan Kumar gave public lectures in St. Petersburg.

In October of 2018 the Center for Historical Research as a member of the European Information and Research Network on Parliamentary History hosted a conference “Parliaments and Representative Democracy in Crises of War, Revolution, and Collapse of Empires.”

We congratulate colleagues on new professional achievements: Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov was elected as the Editor-in-Chief at the “Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale” scholarly journal of the European Association of Anthropologists (EASA); Elena Kochetkova received an award from the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory for the best study of the history of socialism.

We also congratulate Margarita Dadykina for receiving a grant from the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research for the project “Arrival and expenditure books for salt mines of the 17th century Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery” and Yevgeniy Khvalkov for receiving of a research and study group grant “Bishops, Doges, and Merchants: Texts of Medieval Italian Cities of the XIII-XV Centuries.”

In 2018 the department of history grew in size and we welcome assistant professor Kirill Chunikhin (cultural history of Cold War and history of art) and professor Vladimir Bobrovnikov (history and anthropology of Islam and Islamic studies). We also welcome Wictor Marzec as the new postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Historical Research.

Many thanks for colleagues at the department of history and Center for Historical Research for their hard work, special thanks to all our partners for collaboration and support. May the new year reveal ever more challenging and fascinating boundaries of history.

Alexander M. Semyonov, 

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