HSE St Petersburg, Department of History, invites international applicants to its two-year, English-language MA programme “Usable Pasts: Applied and Interdisciplinary History.” The course gives equal weight to both history and its uses. The programme offers strong research-led teaching that draws on the Department’s strength in global, comparative and transnational history, including studies of empires and nationalism, socialism, post-socialism and post-colonialism, environmental and economic history and anthropology, history of science and technology, and the anthropology of memory. Students benefit from interdisciplinary grounding in methods of historical research and textual criticism, cultural heritage and museum studies, anthropology, historical geography and geoinformation systems, digital humanities, oral history and visual methods.
We encourage strong applicants with undergraduate degrees in history and other fields of the humanities, including history of art, literary criticism, modern and medieval languages, anthropology, social and political sciences, economics, law, natural sciences (especially geography and ecology) and engineering. This is an English-language MA that provides skills for further academic study, including PhD, as well as non-academic careers. It includes the possibility of internships in over fifty St Petersburg museums and options for Russian language training.