HSE Open Lectures are Coming to Moscow’s Museums

The 'Open University' project, at the Higher School of Economics is organizing lectures in Moscow museums, following on from the series of free lectures given by HSE professors throughout the summer in Gorky Park. Lectures in museums will be held each Thursday starting from September 26.

The HSE Lecture Centre in Gorky Park was one of HSE’s key public events this summer. Visitors to the park had the chance to listen to fifteen lectures which were intended to be   both enlightening and practical. They gave Muscovites a taste of   the variety of HSE’s faculties and research interests. For some time now the HSE has been growing from a school of economics, into a classical university offering a big range of open lectures, workshops and master classes.

‘HSE is a city university’, said Valeria Kasamara, HSE Director for Corporate Projects and Curator of ‘Museum Thursdays’, ‘With our Moscow projects we want to form an emotional and intellectual city environment which we ourselves feel comfortable  living in’.

The lack of a single campus and distribution of educational venues around the city doesn’t always allow the HSE to welcome everyone interested, and that’s why the HSE has decided to ‘go beyond its walls’. On September 10, 2013, Gorky Park will for the second time host the HSE Day – a university festival, which has already become city-wide. At the end of September the HSE Lecture Centre will move from the open air into Moscow museums.

Both popular and not so well-known (sometimes undeservedly) Moscow museums are welcoming HSE lecturers. Visitors can look at the exhibits, and listen to lectures on topics related to the nature of the museum. The only requirement is that there should be seating capacity for at least 50 participants.

‘Museum Thursdays’ will open, like the Lecture Centre in Gorky Park some time ago, with a lecture from Alexey Maslov, Head of the HSE School of Asian Studies: this time he will talk about European influence and Chinese nationalism.

The director of the Museum of Literature, Dmitri Bak said that these lectures are a ‘sign of the times, as we see a cross-over of notional boundaries and there is clearly a wide public desire to engage in intellectual discussions’.

Altogether there will be 30 lectures in museums during the academic year. The first will be on September 26, 2013, in the State Museum of Oriental Art. Start time: 6.30 pm.

Oleg Seregin, HSE News Service