✚ 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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✚ 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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✚ 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 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?

✚ What is the history of private and public collecting? ✚ What is provenance and how is it researched? ✚ What is the psychology of collecting? ✚ How are museum collecting priorities determined? ✚ How is the storage of museum objects organized? ✚ What practical storage skills are 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?

✚ What is the main value of data and its annotations when solving problems using algorithms? ✚ What is crowdsourcing and what is its role in business processes and research? ✚ How to select the optimal tools for different projects? ✚ How to assess the quality of data and annotations in general? ✚ How can the process be automated at different stages?

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✚ What methods of automatic natural language processing exist? ✚ What tasks does NLP solve? ✚ What are the main approaches for solving text classification and generation problems? ✚ How to process large text collections and handwritten texts in practice?

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✚ What problems do Computer Vision algorithms solve, and how can they be useful in museum research? ✚ What are the main approaches in this area—from classical algorithms to neural networks? ✚ How to develop and train such algorithms for your own tasks? ✚ How to apply and test algorithms and neural network models on your data using Python scripts?

✚ What are the basic principles of visualizing different types of data? ✚ How do I choose and use various tools for working with visualization services? ✚ How do I visualize large and sparse data sets? ✚ How do I choose and build graphs and visualizations so that they convey the main idea and are as informative as possible?

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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 do the evolution of artistic expression and organizational forms of theater and circus relate? ✚ When and why did directing emerge as a creative profession? ✚ How are the spatial and architectural forms of an era connected with the structures of theatrical and musical phenomena? ✚ What is the role of Renaissance and Baroque painting in the development of theater? ✚ What is the semantics of the arena and the box stage? ✚ What does the transition from 19th-century scenery to constructivist scenography mean? ✚ What are the relationships between site-specific art and site-specific theater? ✚ What are the specific features of music and theater as subjects of sociological and socio-psychological analysis? ✚ How can theatrical and musical heritage be museumified? ✚ What practices and approaches are associated with this problem?

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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 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?

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?

✚ 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?

✚ 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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✚ 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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✚ 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?

✚ 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 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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<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>