Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Mass graves became a reality of the first decades of Soviet Russia: victims of the revolution, famine, epidemics, political repression, the Civil War and World War II were often buried in common rather than individual graves. Over the centuries, Russians had regarded such practice as unusual and rarely acceptable. Soviet power needed to change popular mentality and give a new meaning to mass burials for both ideological and political reasons. Svetlana Malysheva studied this phenomenon.

On January 15, HSE welcomed Stephen Kotkin, Professor of History at Princeton University and Associated Senior Research Fellow at HSE’s International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences. Professor Kotkin spoke about his new book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1919-1941 (New York, 2017) to an audience of students, staff, fellow researchers and members of the general public.

Researchers from the Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis (LAMBDA) at the Higher School of Economics have improved their way of analyzing ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) with the use of mobile phones. The work has been carried out as part of the CRAYFIS experiment and the results were presented at the 22nd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics.

Maria Sole Continiello Neri, a native of Rome, Italy, recently joined the Centre of Comparative Law at HSE as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. While at HSE, she will study Russian immigration law and practice against the backdrop of the European Court of Human Rights. She also plans to study law and ethics of the use of Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs) during armed conflict.

Mirror symmetry is a relatively new field of mathematics which came into being in the 1990s. In 2017, HSE opened the International Laboratory for Mirror Symmetry and Automorphic Forms. The December conference, ‘Mirror Symmetry and Applications’, was a commemoration of its first year of operation.

The idea of ageing well assumes that a mature individual remains active, healthy, and attractive. Society places this demand on women in particular. HSE researchers have published an article in Ageing & Society that looks at the strategies women over 50 choose.

Jessica Werneke, who completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa and her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, joined the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences as a Research Fellow in 2016. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, she has spent a considerable amount of time living internationally – in both the UK and Latvia – and following her post-doc plans to start a new position as a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy at Loughborough University, where she will continue her research on Soviet photography clubs and amateur photographers in the RSFSR and the Baltic Republics.

Irina Savelieva, HSE Tenured Professor, Professor in the Faculty of Humanities’ School of History, Director of the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, spoke on her deciding to work in academia, research and teaching achievements as well as her decision to join HSE.