✚ How can contemporary humanities theories become a "toolkit" that helps us see the world and culture in a new way? ✚ What important ideas and texts of the 20th and 21st centuries have changed our understanding of culture? ✚ How can we learn to read difficult theoretical texts and understand key concepts? ✚ How can we apply theoretical ideas to museum research and curatorial projects? ✚ What are the benefits of working collaboratively on texts and discussing theory in a group?

✚ What types of exhibition texts are there? ✚ What principles should be followed when writing a curatorial text? ✚ What is a sectional text and how is it related to a curatorial text? ✚ What is the structure and characteristics of a critical text? ✚ How can artificial intelligence be effectively used to work with texts in a museum? ✚ How do you write a press release? ✚ How do spatial and graphic design influence the perception of exhibition texts?

✚ 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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✚ Where should we look for the starting point of a contemporary artistic project? ✚ How did the sociocultural and political transformations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries influence the artistic language of the "long 19th century" and continue to influence the development of contemporary art? ✚ What does the concept of "art around 1800" mean, and why did this milestone become a turning point in art history? ✚ How do curatorial practices shape historical and cultural consciousness? ✚ How is Werner Hofmann's exhibition cycle "Art Around 1800" connected to contemporary critical theories (feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism)?

✚ How has the history of curating evolved from the 18th century to the present day? ✚ How does a curatorial project differ from an exhibition, and why are these differences fundamental? ✚ How is a curatorial project structured? ✚ What is the role of ethics and professional responsibility in curatorial activity? ✚ How does an idea shape exhibition design and influence the visual language of a project? ✚ What are the stages of an exhibition project, and the methodology for developing a curatorial concept? ✚ What is interpretation, and how does it become the basis of a curatorial project? ✚ How do storytelling and narrative structures work in an exhibition? ✚ How does a curator engage with the audience, and what forms of participation are possible? ✚ What are the approaches to working with an object in an exhibition? ✚ How does the architecture of the space influence curatorial decisions and the perception of an exhibition? ✚ How do color and light become tools of curatorial language?

✚ How to write Python scripts to solve basic problems? ✚ How to process multiple files automatically? ✚ What do you need to know in mathematics to try machine learning and neural networks later? ✚ What else should you master to solve your own problems and develop algorithms using Python?

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✚ What are the modern principles of educational design? ✚ What is the "educational experience"? ✚ How can we transform passive information transfer into an engaging and personally meaningful process? ✚ How can we stimulate collaboration, curiosity, and inquiry in students? ✚ What are the characteristics of different models, logics, and practices of modern educational design?

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✚ What is a museum today: an institution, a medium, a place of memory, or a social machine? ✚ How have contemporary museum models and practices evolved from the "museum," the reliquary, and the cabinet of curiosities? ✚ Which functions are considered basic (preservation, research, education, access), and how do they conflict with or reinforce each other? ✚ How do museums produce and/or reflect individual and collective identities? ✚ How do the ideas of new, critical, and reflexive museology change the daily work of a museum curator? ✚ How do local contexts of non-European museums shape different models of management, collecting, and publicity? ✚ How to measure the effect of participation: what is considered the success of participatory practices, and how can we avoid "participation for the sake of participation"? ✚ What is the social mission of a museum as an agent of change, and where are its limits?

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✚ How is museum architecture connected to the cultural perceptions of its era? ✚ How does architecture express national identity? ✚ Why is the early 20th century called the "crisis of museum architecture," and what role did the "white cube" play in it? ✚ Where is the line between a museum as an educational institution and a museum as a spectacle? ✚ How does an architect choose between functional requirements and representativeness? ✚ How does the urban context influence museum design? ✚ What principles of exhibition and interior organization help manage visitor attention? ✚ How does architecture influence visitor perception, fatigue, and engagement? ✚ Why do museum architectural competitions become a platform for cultural discussions?

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✚ What process management skills are needed to implement creative projects? ✚ What is the role of museums in the creative industries? ✚ What are the stages of cultural project implementation? ✚ How can exhibitions be implemented in practice? ✚ How can conferences, public programs, and festivals be organized? ✚ What is the legal basis for museum activities? ✚ What are the specifics of interaction with various museum stakeholders, from curators to contractors?

✚ What is the heuristic potential of new approaches in anthropological research into various aspects of ethnographic museum life? ✚ How is the heterogeneous nature of a museum manifested? ✚ How do museum staff, objects, ideas, and visitors interact in a museum? ✚ What is the role of museums in the development of ethnography as a science? ✚ How is ethnocultural identity constructed in museums?

✚ 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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How do museums work with the past: national, regional, local? ✚ Why is a museum a social institution for producing the past? ✚ What is new museology and memory studies? ✚ How have the museum's mission, museum language, and place in the structure of social relations changed? ✚ How does a museum become a place of memory and a "third place" in the urban landscape, an instrument of memory politics and a territory of disputes and conflicts? ✚ How is a nostalgic effect created in a museum space?

✚ What skills are needed to conduct research in museum projects? ✚ How to extract, understand, and process information about exhibits? ✚ How to implement interdisciplinary collaboration in the museum environment? ✚ Which methods from the humanities and natural sciences are useful for museum work? ✚ Why are DNA identification and paleogenomics needed in museum work?

✚ 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?

✚ 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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✚ What is the history of digital humanities? ✚ What current challenges exist in the field of digital humanities? ✚ What methodological approaches are used when working with digital data? ✚ What opportunities do digital humanities offer for research? ✚ How can digital humanities tools be used productively in museum work?

✚ How did illustrated magazines become an important means of mass communication? ✚ How did the combination of text, image, and material form shape a magazine's impact? ✚ What do editorial decisions, production, and distribution reveal about the cultural role of magazines? ✚ What do illustrated magazines reveal about the everyday life, politics, and values ​​of their time? ✚ What methods, including new digital tools, help us study illustrated magazines?

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?

✚ How did art fairs become a key institution in the art world? ✚ What is the history of their emergence and institutional evolution? ✚ What is the role of art fairs in shaping the artistic canon, market, and cultural policy? ✚ How do fairs influence the production, circulation, and perception of contemporary art?

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✚ What is the history, theory, and practice of creating large-scale exhibition projects in the late 19th – early 21st centuries? ✚ How has the emphasis in exhibition activities gradually shifted from "text" to "context"? ✚ How does the idea of ​​a biennial emerge and develop? ✚ How has this format influenced the emergence of the curator? ✚ What is unique about the critical debate about the inevitable globalization of exhibition policy?

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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 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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✚ 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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✚ 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 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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✚ 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?

✚ 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 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?

✚ 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?

<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>