School of Arts and Cultural Heritage

The School of Arts and Cultural Heritage was founded on the basis of the Department of Art History that existed at the university. We study painting, graphic arts, architecture, literature, cinema, photography and general problems of visual and material culture in both a synchronous and diachronic perspective. We explore the interaction of the languages of art and their mediums. We teach not so much the "material" itself, but, rather, methods and approaches to analysis of the material. This allows our students to select analytical keys to a wide variety of objects.

Students of the school receive fundamental and relevant knowledge in the field of art history, of museum management and curatorship. They also have the opportunity to engage with modern technological resources and develop skills with representatives from other scholarly fields. Two scientific and technical research laboratories organized within the school are dedicated to these goals.

The school's programs are aimed at training a new generation of scholars and trainees capable of teaching and conducting research, to create scholarly and popular-science projects, and to work in museums and other cultural institutions.

Courses are built on the principle of problem-based learning and focus on posing and discussing questions. Training includes lectures, seminars and hands-on work in classrooms as well as the depositories of the State Hermitage and other museums of St. Petersburg in addition to independent study. Students and graduate students learn to write scholarly texts and present them to colleagues at seminars and conferences. They also work with literary and archival materials and learn to employ modern analytical tools and digital technologies in their research.