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Centre for Studies in History and Culture

Staff

Centre director

Maria Necludova
 

Specialists

   Maria Neklyudova
   Janna Vasilyeva
  
  
  
   Igor Kobylin
   Yulia Liderman
  
   Theodore Nicolai
  

About the Centre

The Centre for Studies in History and Culture (CSHC) traces its origins to the Centre for Studies in Humanities, which had been carrying out research projects since 2011. CSHC conducts interdisciplinary research into intellectual elites’, governmental structures’ and economic institutes’ interaction problems.

Projects

Project 1 Mechanisms of reception and reinterpretation of European theories and methodologies of public administration during Early Modern public institutions’ formation era in Russia

The main research objective under this project is revealing mechanisms, by which European theories and methodologies of public administration were accepted and reinterpreted in Early Modern Russia (from the end of the 17th century to the first half of the 18th century), and identifying the role of said mechanisms’ in formation of key public institutions.
 

Project 2 Strategies of institution-building in the post-Stalin USSR (education, science and culture)

This project is focused on studying the following closely linked problems: 1) the very changes in building of institutions (both formal and informal, public and “shadow”, and institutions of any intermediate forms); 2) their social and political context, including international context; 3) their social and psychological prerequisites and consequences. The latter appears especially important both as far as theory and as practice are concerned. We are planning to study mutual influence of popular sentiment and changes in the identity of people, on one hand, and institutional development, on the other hand. While studying other countries and eras, the most important results became available via this very research area, and said results enable dwelling upon general patterns of modern societies’ social dynamics.
 

Project 3 Crowdsourcing in the humanities: innovative technologies and communicative modes of knowledge production in digital era

This projects dwells upon the experience and technologies of implementing crowdsourcing programs and projects, both of large scale and of medium scale cooperation, based upon online commons-based peer production – including projects concerning both the humanities (the New York Public Library program, Bentham Papers Archive project) and other areas of knowledge (space programs, free software development, etc.) The main research objective is to reveal and to describe the structure of both successful and unsuccessful projects involving arrangement and implementation of crowdsourcing – with subsequent development of guidelines for arranging such activities in the area of research and expertise in the humanities.
 

Project 4 Media and technologies in a modern city

Over the last decade, the development of digital technologies and the impact of networks became the topics most in-demand in the social sciences. Urban studies reflecting numerous changes to modern megapolises are no less popular. Within this project we suppose to merge these research areas while discussing digital era requirements for modern cities and modern city studies. The main research objective is to study the theoretical basis and the possibilities of practical implementation of integrating knowledge of constructive, communicative, technological and other changes of the digital era into activities dedicated to transformation and improvement of the appearance and structure of modern Russian cities.
 

Project 5 Sociocultural modeling of new communities in the 20th and 21st century theater and performance art

This project is dedicated to methodological work upon the performative dimension of the 20th and 21st century arts and culture. Despite the current Russian situation of institutional “archiving” of information, several zones of increased social and theatrical activity in Russian art – those of the 1910s – 1920s, of the 1960s – 1970s, of the years 1985 – 2000 and of current period – are researched upon. Theatrical communities and performance and actionist communities are conceived in terms of cultural anthropology (as far as theater is concerned) and of social history (of arts).