Regular Research Seminars

Seminars within the prioritized interdisciplinary areas of research excellence

City, Spatial Analysis and International Development
Coordinators: Jacques-François Thisse, Leonid E. Limonov

Diversity Studies and Comparative Social and Cultural Research
Coordinators: Eduard Ponarin, Boris Gasparov, Maxim Khomyakov

Digital Social Sciences and Humanities, or Digital Society
Coordinators: Daniil A. Alexandrov, Evgeny A. Antipov

Sustainable Development of Business in Global Economics
Coordinators: Elena Rogova, Christopher Gerry

Seminars of the departments and research laboratories

Center for Historical Research and Department of History
Research seminar 'Boundaries of History'

The department hosts the regular research seminar 'Boundaries of History' chaired by prof. Alexander Semyonov. The potent metaphor of boundaries is deployed in the title of the seminar to 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.

Department of Comparative Literature and Linguistics
Discontinuous cultural spaces
Convened by Boris Gasparov and Boris Maslov

The research seminar at the Department of Comparative Literature and Linguistics serves as a forum for discussing various aspects of contemporary literary studies, linguistics, and humanities more broadly. The uniting theme of the seminar is the problem of the discontinuity of cultural space, in which languages, meanings, discourses, and texts of various types coexist and interact. We approach culture not as a homogenous whole or a rigidly organized system, but instead as a complex construction composed of diverse intentions, influences, practices, forms of direct and mediated contact. The discontinuity of cultural space, which is reflected in the structure of language as well as in literary forms, has an important historical dimension: culture is necessarily nonsynchronous and always carries within it its past, whose elements may undergo selective reanimation as a token of the present or as a vector directed into the future.