The European University at St. Petersburg and the State Hermitage Museum create the International School of Arts and Cultural Heritage. The project will bring together a world-class museum, an advanced center of scholarship and education, and an innovative industry.
SAINT PETERSBURG — November 10, 2021
Thanks to the creation of the School, the long-term partnership between the European University and the Hermitage will rise to a new level. This partnership has a long history with world-renowned specialists such as Mikhail B. Piotrovsky, (Director of the Hermitage and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the European University, and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Arts) teaching in the programs of the Faculty of Art History. A fundamentally new element of the School will be the participation of high-tech companies. Yandex and BrainGarden have become partners in the creation of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Genotek Medical Genetic Center and Grotex (the Solofarm brand) are participating in the Paleogenomics Laboratory.
The mission of the new School is to create a community of professionals capable of preserving the value of art and cultural heritage in the new technological environment of the 21st century.
In the coming years, a new educational and scientific environment will form in St. Petersburg, uniting museums, the city and the world. Together, professors in art history, museum curators, and specialists in machine learning, genetics and design will all participate in teaching students and implementing projects that will have a life of their own outside the classrooms.
Art historians, curators, and museum staff, by working together with geneticists and computer scientists, will gain new tools for their work. The Hermitage and other museums in Russia will be able to create new communities, introducing them to both global and Russian cultural heritage.
As its foundation, the School will retain a focus on fundamental education in art history. Expanding the interdisciplinary approach, it will also provide knowledge in the field of museum management and curatorship, teach how to work with machine intelligence as well as how to engage with scholars from other academic disciplines.
Art and cultural heritage work when they cross not only disciplinary boundaries, but also national ones. While studying at the European University in St. Petersburg, studying the Hermitage collections and participating in organizing exhibitions, talented students from all over the world will be able to share the experience of one of the world's best museums. The educational program of the new School will be at the masters and postgraduate studies level. It will also include continuing professional education. For the city and the world, the School will conduct public lectures and master classes, and arrange art residences and summer programs with the involvement of global experts, curators, and artists.
Contacts:
Liya Chechik, Director of the School of Arts and Cultural Heritage
lchechik@eu.spb.ru