✚ What are the problems of studying, periodizing, and classifying the Russian avant-garde of the 1900-1930s? ✚ How did individual artistic systems emerge that led to the formation of universal features of form construction? ✚ How were schools of the Russian avant-garde formed? ✚ How did art relate to the religious and philosophical thought of its time? ✚ How are the terms "avant-garde" and "modernism" related? ✚ What were the paths to non-objective art in the avant-garde? ✚ How did the avant-garde relate to the social-utopian ideas of its time? ✚ How did the Russian avant-garde develop after the forced isolation caused by the war of 1914-1918? ✚ What directions can be distinguished in the Russian avant-garde?

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✚ What is the background to the idea of ​​cultural and intellectual history as a permanent exchange? ✚ What is translatio studii and what are the foundations of this idea? ✚ What is the essence of the comparative study of cultural phenomena? ✚ How can we understand the patterns and specifics of cultural transfer? ✚ What is intellectual history as a discipline?

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✚ How can a building be analyzed as historical and social evidence? ✚ What messages does a building convey, what does it “speak” to the viewer – through its plan and facades, interior structure and exterior appearance, composition and details, the nature of the concept and the quality of execution? ✚ How is architecture “read,” how can one connect the viewer’s experience, the social, ideological, and political contexts of historical and contemporary construction – and the values ​​that architects themselves associated with their profession? ✚ How was the professional vision of architecture organized by architects themselves – and how did this vision relate to the social use of architecture? ✚ How is an opinion about a building, about a project, formed, how is a critical and analytical text constructed? ✚ How are the criteria of architectural quality defined in different eras? ✚ What apparatus can an art historian use to analyze an architectural monument? ✚ What concepts and terms mediate architectural morphology and composition, what is the genealogy of the main categories of formal discourse in architecture?

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✚ How is the current Russian education model changing? ✚ What new requirements are being formulated by the Federal State Educational Standard? ✚ What teaching methods in higher education are relevant in the modern educational environment? ✚ What strategies for planning and organizing the educational process contribute to maximum student engagement and improve their academic performance? ✚ How can effective teaching materials be developed that take into account the diversity of learning styles and student needs? ✚ What approaches to inclusive education can be applied to ensure equal access to education for students with special needs?

✚ How did art history develop? ✚ What types of art literature were significant for its development? ✚ What methodologies and approaches shaped the development of art history in the 19th and 20th centuries? ✚ What art historical debates were central during this time? ✚ How does methodology relate to various ideological and political contexts?

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✚ How to use information technology in educational and research activities? ✚ What opportunities do modern information search services provide? ✚ How to navigate the modern information space? ✚ How to work with electronic publications and text editors? ✚ How to properly format a bibliographic description? ✚ What are the basics of data visualization?

✚ Is it true that art and art history have ended? ✚ What is visual culture, and why does it vary at different times? ✚ What of what we do with our hands is a "formula of pathos"? ✚ When did angels get wings? ✚ How to write a cultural history of monkeys? ✚ How to see art through the eyes of its contemporary? ✚ Where does the "cartographic impulse" lead? ✚ Is physiognomy a science? ✚ Why did the "Venus of Urbino" anger Mark Twain? ✚ How to depict time? ✚ When did characters in historical paintings dress "for the weather"? ✚ What does the fourth dimension look like? ✚ What is depicted in an abstract painting?

✚ How to effectively use a foreign language in professional and research activities? ✚ How to develop authentic listening skills? ✚ How to improve oral and written communication in professional communication? ✚ What are the basic principles of writing academic texts in a foreign language?

✚ How to describe all the methods of text analysis using a triangle? ✚ Philosophers say that art is imitation. Is this good or bad? ✚ What is genre memory, and why do you definitely have it? ✚ What have we lost by abandoning the study of rhetoric? ✚ What are "commonplaces," and why is it useful to know them? ✚ Is it true that living and dead poets talk to each other? ✚ What happened after the "death of the author"? ✚ How was Gogol's "The Overcoat" made? ✚ How to read a text that doesn't exist?

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✚ What are the basic principles of creating academic texts? ✚ What are the genre features of essays, annotations, and abstracts? ✚ Why is it important to format bibliographical descriptions correctly? ✚ Why are bibliographic footnotes needed? ✚ How to edit scientific texts? ✚ What is academic ethics and why is it important to observe it? ✚ What are the rules of scientific etiquette?

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✚ How does architecture function as a tool of social communication? ✚ How is the historical imagination relevant to the era embodied in historical and contemporary architecture? ✚ How are the social values ​​of a consumerist-oriented society embodied in the hedonistic architecture of Art Deco? ✚ What are the cultural, social, artistic, and technological foundations of this architecture? ✚ How are different forms of political control and different types of professional culture and practice embodied in the architecture of totalitarian regimes? ✚ How is the experience of tragedy embodied and constructed in the architecture of monuments of the 20th and 21st centuries? ✚ How do contemporary architects work in the “cult” genre, how is the tradition of religious construction of the last century structured? ✚ How are corporeal and spatial intuition and reflection embodied in architecture and architectural theory? ✚ How do architects work with the problem of national and local identity?

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What methods of attribution exist for Western European paintings and graphic works from the 15th-18th centuries? How are historical, iconographic, and stylistic methods applied in modern attribution? What technical and technological research is conducted to establish the authenticity of paintings and graphic works? How does a replica differ from a copy, and a fake from an imitation? What stories of forgeries have been uncovered? How can the degree of credibility of a supposed author be assessed? How should one correctly read the notes on the mat of original drawings and the address on an engraving?

✚ What are the problems of literary sociology in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries? ✚ How can a literary work be analyzed through social and ideological contexts? ✚ How can the relationship between writer and reader be considered as a reflection of social processes and mechanisms of transformation of public consciousness? ✚ What practices and mediators determine the interaction between literary and social systems?

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✚ What theoretical approaches to cinema exist from the late 19th to the 1980s? ✚ How did film theory develop as a distinct field with specific issues? ✚ What was the problem of the mechanical reproduction of reality for 19th-century aesthetic theory? ✚ How does the theoretical question arise: can cinema be art? ✚ What is the specificity of understanding cinema through the analysis of film material? ✚ What is the essence of understanding cinema in terms of editing? ✚ How did the problem of specifically cinematic semantics arise?

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✚ What is "photography" and what is unique about the field of photography studies? ✚ How is the history of photography written, and what are its alternative histories? ✚ How was photography understood as a cultural phenomenon in the 19th–21st centuries? ✚ What is photography studies doing today, and what are the current issues in understanding photography? ✚ What questions have become particularly important for understanding photography in different cultural and historical contexts? ✚ What is photographic "indexicality," and what are the consequences of our belief in the veracity of photography? ✚ How has thinking about photography changed as photographic technologies have changed? ✚ How to write and think about photography?

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✚ What key artistic questions shape the agenda of contemporary art? ✚ What philosophical and institutional questions define the boundaries of contemporary art? ✚ What are the general problems in the history of ideas, concepts, movements, and institutions of contemporary art? ✚ What critical texts raise current issues in contemporary art?

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✚ What lies at the intersection of word and image? ✚ How do images die? ✚ Is it true that painting and poetry are sisters? ✚ What happened after the "visual turn"? ✚ What did medieval comics look like? ✚ Why was Sarah Bernhardt a bad film actress? ✚ Why did the Futurists collect and display signs? ✚ Why are there so few good film adaptations?

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✚ What scientific tools are used in photography studies? ✚ What are the specific features of photography – as an object, an image, a practice? ✚ What are the main methods and approaches to analyzing photographs and other visual sources? ✚ How do approaches to photography research differ in art history, cultural history, and anthropology? ✚ How can we study not only individual photographs but also photo collections? ✚ What, besides the photographic image itself, might be of interest to photography researchers?

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✚ Why can we speak of a St. Petersburg school of "humanitarian regional studies"? ✚ What areas of European medieval studies, geography, philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, and other sciences served as the context and source of the school's terminology? ✚ What are its methodological foundations and key texts? ✚ What was the fate of the school's scholars and institutions? ✚ What role did this early 20th-century school of scholarship play in the development of modern urban studies?

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✚ What theater trends and forms were rapidly developing in the 1920s? ✚ How did the socio-historical context influence this? ✚ What is the place of mass theatrical events in the context of the development of world artistic culture? ✚ Can we talk about the role of the Russian and European artistic avant-garde in the formation of a new language of theatrical art? ✚ How did diverse intercultural ties develop during this period, and how were they curtailed as a result of the country's policy of cultural isolation? ✚ How did academic and popular genres interact in the music of the 1920s?

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✚ How are theater, music, and circus related and different as performing arts? ✚ What are the prospects for analyzing their relationships with literature and the visual arts? ✚ What are musical and theatrical keys to literature? ✚ How has theatrical space evolved? ✚ What are the methods for analyzing stage productions? ✚ What role does the audience play in theater? ✚ What are the differences between a play, a concert, and a performance?

✚ What are the challenges of interaction between photography and literature in the 19th–21st centuries? ✚ What are the similarities between realism in photography and literature? ✚ What place and significance do plots directly or indirectly related to photographic images, objects, and practices have in literature? ✚ How is the literary practice of "reading photography" structured? ✚ How is photographic visuality conveyed in fiction? ✚ How can we analyze cultural objects in which photography is combined with text? ✚ What methods and approaches are used to study the relationship between literature and photography?

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✚ How did the relationship between literature and cinema develop from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries? ✚ How did Russian literature at the turn of the century perceive early cinema? ✚ How did writers work in cinema? ✚ How were literary texts adapted for the screen? ✚ How are literary quotes used in film?

✚ How do architects think about their subject? ✚ What concepts are used to construct a conversation about architecture? ✚ What professional and social values ​​do architects and theorists associate with buildings, and how do historically changing ideologies and design practices determine the ways in which these values ​​are embodied? ✚ What concepts and values ​​does architectural thought inherit from generation to generation, and which ones come with each new historical era? ✚ How do ideas about the tasks of an architect and the social functions of construction change? ✚ How are classical architectural texts structured, and what does their structure reveal about how professionals perceive their field? ✚ How can we separate the instrumental content of texts from their rhetorical design? ✚ How do the practices of the authors of key texts in the history of the architectural profession relate to their theories? ✚ How do the manifestos of 20th-century architects represent the current challenges and future of architecture, and how did this imagined future become reality?

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✚ How did drawing develop in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the 20th century? ✚ What place did drawing occupy in the work of artists of different eras? ✚ What drawing techniques exist, and how did they emerge and evolve historically? ✚ What is the history of collecting original drawings? ✚ How to conduct a professional analysis of graphic works? ✚ How to define and characterize an artist's individual style (using the example of sheets in the Hermitage collection)?

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✚ How is the emergence of secular Jewish culture, primarily fine art, connected with the general political and national challenges facing Jews at the turn of the 20th centuries? ✚ What is Jewish folk art? ✚ How was it discovered? ✚ How did the Jewish artistic avant-garde emerge? ✚ What are its main achievements? ✚ How were national issues and the utopia of creating a "Jewish style" exhausted by the mid-1920s? ✚ Why did photography become the "main" national art form? ✚ Can photography be "read" in the context of national cultural tradition? ✚ How did agrarian colonization become the "main" project in Soviet Jewish nation-building? ✚ How was it represented by photography, cinema, and literature? ✚ How did Soviet anti-religious propaganda become a focal point for Soviet artists? ✚ How, using translations from Yiddish as an example, was the canon of Soviet children's literature formed?

✚ How to speak the language of emblems? ✚ How is the Russian "graphosphere" structured? ✚ How are "intelligent eyes" different from "spiritual eyes"? ✚ What does a poet see from a bird's eye view? ✚ What is a "picturesque journey" and do you need a ticket for it? ✚ What do typical characters look like in typical circumstances? ✚ What happens if you put Nikanor Ivanovich's lips to Ivan Kuzmich's nose? ✚ Why are Tatyana Larina and Anna Karenina brunettes? ✚ What "the proud foreign gaze will not notice" in the Russian landscape?

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✚ Why is engraving the most effective tool of cultural transfer in the visual arts? ✚ How did engraving become a liberal art? ✚ How was engraving instruction integrated into the academic art education system in Russia? ✚ Why can we consider engraving technique to be a message? ✚ And how does the new printing technique dictate a new image? ✚ What models were used to represent power in 18th-century Russian engraving? ✚ How does a reproduction engraving reproduce and substitute for an absent painting or sculpture? ✚ What is lubok, and can it be distinguished from professional art? ✚ Funny sheets and paper icons – what place did lubok occupy in peasant and urban lower-class life? ✚ How did the lubok market change from the 18th to the early 20th centuries? ✚ Who, when, and why collected and studied Russian popular prints?

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✚ What artistic phenomena in 15th-16th-century Netherlandish art are causing heated debate? ✚ How has the work of Rogier van der Weyden been critically re-examined? ✚ What is the problem with the "Frank van der Stockt group"? ✚ What are the results of the restoration of Jan van Eyck's "Ghent Altarpiece"? ✚ What are the current questions raised in the study of Hieronymus Bosch's work? ✚ What attributions of Netherlandish paintings in the Hermitage collection are causing scholarly controversy? ✚ How have monographic exhibitions of the last two decades influenced our understanding of the corpus of works by the greatest masters of the Northern Renaissance? ✚ How has "International Mannerism" been rethought? ✚ What are the results of the projects on the corpora of works by Rubens and Rembrandt? ✚ What discoveries have been made in the study of Flemish masters' paintings and graphic works in the Hermitage in recent decades?

✚ How does contemporary architecture shape our way of life? ✚ How do contemporary architects solve social problems? ✚ How does contemporary architecture interact with history? ✚ How is this reflected in the practice of developing historic cities, in restoration ideologies, in discussions about heritage preservation, including that of the modernist era? ✚ How is an architect's "professional kitchen" structured, how is the path from a building's concept to its implementation constructed, and what design forms and technologies mediate it? ✚ How do practicing architects—the seminar's guests—see the values ​​of their profession and the specifics of today's practice? ✚ What problems are discussed, and what values ​​and ideas are affirmed, by the authors of the texts proposed for discussion at the seminar?

✚ How did the image of Islam become a fundamental element of European culture? ✚ What was the West's response to Islam? ✚ What are the characteristics of Islamic art? ✚ What has Europe overlooked?

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✚ What is the historical connection between literature and psychology? ✚ How did ancient psychology become the foundation of the European tradition of human perception? ✚ How did appeals to mythology become a way of constructing plots and characters? ✚ How has genius been studied in literature and psychology? ✚ Can developmental periods help in interpreting literary works? ✚ What is the history of emotional culture?

✚ What is a painting? ✚ How do painting materials influence the characteristics and artistic qualities of works? ✚ What are the decorative, social, communicative, commemorative, didactic, and other functions of a painting? ✚ Why is genre important for understanding a painting? ✚ How does the myth of the artist influence the perception of a work?

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✚ What is the history of reading? ✚ Why are reading practices not universal but have a historical dimension? ✚ How did the shift from "what was read" to "how was read" occur? ✚ How does the concept of "interpretive community" apply to historical material? ✚ How can the phenomenon of literacy become an object of research? ✚ What are the new approaches to the history of reading?

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<p id="">During their studies, students gain experience both participating in and independently organizing large-scale scientific events. The School of Arts and Cultural Heritage regularly hosts scientific conferences on current issues in art, museology, and cultural heritage preservation. Leading experts, researchers, and students participate in these conferences, creating a platform for professional dialogue and the exchange of ideas.</p>

<p id="">This is a practical laboratory course in which students and auditors from the European University work on creating visual art exhibitions. The "circle" combines elements of project management, teamwork, and artistic practice: we examine photographs, develop an exhibition concept, discuss current issues in contemporary curating, develop an exhibition plan, write curatorial texts and press releases—and ultimately, together, open the exhibition to the public.</p>

<p id="">Students from the School of Arts complete an internship at the State Hermitage Museum, one of the largest museums in the world, and gain insight into museum processes from the inside.</p>