'I needed the past rather for the sake of better understanding of the present'

Mikhail Tyurkin, St Petersburg School of Arts and Humanities

There are people who want to settle well in our world, and there are people who strive to understand how our world works. I belong rather to the second group and consider myself to be a researcher by nature. But the path to science turned out to be quite long and thorny in my case.

I graduated from the Faculty of History of St Petersburg State University, the Department of Modern and Contemporary History. Besides, I studied German history at the University of Hamburg, Germany. But after receiving my diploma, I didn’t seek to study the past professionally for quite a long time. I needed the past rather for the sake of better understanding of the present.

I have been working in international journalism for ten years. I was a correspondent, editor, and ran my own column for a number of print and online media outlets in Russia, Germany, and Serbia. I've interviewed historical figures, ranging from cosmonaut Alexei Leonov to writer Evgeny Vodolazkin, from former German Chancellor Gerhard Schöder to the first Beatles drummer Pete Best. As a reporter, I found myself in the thick of historical events, covering the separation of Kosovo from Serbia, protests on Maidan square in Kiev, referendum in Crimea and migration crisis in Europe. I also wrote travel reportages about China, Japan, and India.

But almost ten years ago I decided to learn another profession. That's how I became a university lecturer and media researcher. My field of research is related to my journalistic and historical background. It includes the study of international media sphere, representation of history in social media, digital transformation of well-known media brands and the use of artificial intelligence in mass communications.

I am most committed to studying media systems in different countries and regions, primarily Germany, India and Latin America. I research into how current media trends are related to ‘eternal themes’, such as history, religion, mentality, ‘cultural codes’ and so forth. Currently, I am studying generation as a communicative phenomenon, or rather, how the media formed the myth of the ‘generation of 1968’, which became the key agent of the global cultural revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Without a careful study of these events, it is impossible to understand our information, postmodern era when literally everything becomes the subject to mediatisation–from global politics to our everyday life.

I have been working at HSE University since 2022, and since 2023, I have been an academic supervisor of the bachelor's programme ‘Media Communications’.

Our professional goal is to produce versatile specialists who are aware of the full cycle of media production – from coming up with an idea and developing a concept to creating and distributing the content.

Already, our students are implementing PR strategies, organising events, writing texts, shooting videos, recording podcasts for our partners–from the State Hermitage Museum to famous business media like RBC. And, of course, we study the media reality of the 21st century together. Because a real researcher is someone who studies and teaches all his life.