The defence of the doctoral thesis “Architectures of Life-Building in the Twentieth Century: Russia, Germany, Sweden” took place at the Södertörn University, Stockholm on December 7, 2018. Department of Aesthetics. The opponent: Thordis Arrhenius, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm. Link to the full text: http://sh.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1263164&dswid=-7863

Dynamic stochastic economic models normally build on the assumption of time-invariant preferences, technology and laws of motions for exogenous variables. We relax this assumption and consider a class of infinite-horizon nonstationary models in which parameters can follow both deterministic and stochastic trends: the former trends take the form of anticipated shifts and drifts, and the latter trends take the form of Markov process with time-varying transition probabilities.

After the great success of Viagra, pharmaceutical companies have set a new goal: the "female Viagra", i.e. a pill for hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), the most commonly diagnosed female sexual dysfunction. Each subsequent proposal for the treatment of low desire showed the process of disease mongering in all its glory and simultaneous attempts to strengthen the hypotheses about its biological basis: depending of the drug manufacturer HSDD was supposed to be due to androgen deficiency, disordered pelvic blood circulation, or neurotransmitters imbalance.

The seminar is organized by the multidisciplinary research project ‘Between Normal and Abnormal – Cultural meanings of Dementia and Old Age in Finnish and Russian Cultures’ (DemOldCult) funded by Kone Foundation, Finland. View and download the program

Hegel famously maintained that no philosophy can be summed up in a single proposition or a first principle. As he said in the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Any so-called basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false, just because it is only a principle.” Its truth can only lie in its development, its deployment, ultimately in a system, not in the assessment of some foundational proposition.

Ukraine continues to face one of the worst HIV epidemics in Europe. To date, prevention efforts there have largely consisted of information dissemination and needle/syringe exchange and distribution. In an effort to introduce new, culturally relevant and effective prevention strategies into Ukraine, a team of medical anthropologists and sociologists from the U.S. and Ukraine worked with local HIV activists in Ukraine to create and pilot novel, bottom-up interventions for drug users based on U.S. behavior change theories.

Growing numbers of people today are reluctant to describe their identity and social practices as either religious or secular, and prefer to portray themselves as "spiritual”.

On November 29, 2018, the Research Center ENERPO of the European University at Saint-Petersburg will welcome the third International CLEAN ENERGY Forum. The Forum will give room to discussions on clean energy and climate change: risks, strategies and possibilities.

How do incumbents in electoral authoritarian regimes manage to secure extraordinarily high levels of their electoral support? This study examines the determinants of the allocation of federal transfers to regional budgets in Russia to test whether the interbudgetary payments are used as a politically neutral tool with welfare equalizing goals or pursue various political aims of self-interested actors.

China has rapidly evolved energy and climate change policies to meet several goals of energy security, air pollution control, industrial development, and carbon emissions reduction. This has significant economic, social and environmental impacts domestically and internationally. This talk focuses on the CIS countries and Mongolia (and possibly Russia) to explore these impacts and to discuss further implications.

On Wednesday, September 12, 2018, Dean of EUSP International Programs Maria Trofimova presented her views on the topic of Academic Freedom in Europe at EAIE conference in Geneva. She discussed an important distinction between academic freedom and institutional autonomy, threats to academic freedom from outside and from within academia, and importance of international academic solidarity.

Gazprom against US LNG and EU Commission - An economist’s view on natural gas competition

On August 10, 2018, Rosobrnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science, finally issued its order No. 1140, granting a new teaching license to the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP). The University was granted the right to implement all graduate and postgraduate programs for which it applied in the fields of anthropology, art history, economics, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology. EUSP’s primary concern is to re-enroll those students forced to suspend their MA studies due to the revocation of the license.

The on-site inspection of the European University at St. Petersburg lasted two days and ended on August 1, 2018. Rosobrnadzor experts Alexander Balashov, Dmitry Sinkov and Elena Verkhovskaya found no violations of licensing requirements. The inspection report has established the availability of

On June 28, the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal in Moscow reviewed the EUSP appeal and ordered to leave the previous decision in force. This was the last act in our lawsuit against Rosobrnadzor.

Though empirical literature on the effects of export incentives for domestic export is very rich, export incentives’ effects for third countries' export have not yet been examined empirically. This paper sheds some light on this issue. According to existing theory, effects of domestic export incentives for third countries' exporters can be both negative (due to increased competition) and positive (due to input-output linkages in global value chains (GVCs)).

Following on Wednesday's talk, this lecture will focus on the contribution of nationalism to the emotional repertoire of humanity. At the core of the argument will be the claim that self-realization, including its central venues and expressions such as love and happiness, was such a contribution and that these emotions, contrary to what is generally believed, are therefore functions of nationalism and uniquely modern.

The talk will focus on the nature of nationalism and its spread, between the 16th and the 20th centuries, within its original monotheistic civilization. This will be contrasted with the particular dynamics of the globalization of national consciousness in the last decades, as it breaks through these borders and penetrates into China and India.

Since his rise to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has crafted a public persona whose appeal relies on a clearly constructed larger-than-life masculinity. Perceived by some as the return of charismatic leadership to post-Soviet Russia and by others as pure camp, Putin’s masculinity functions as the cornerstone of a gender order that paradoxically seeks to naturalize the binary opposition between male and female through artifice and exaggeration.

Higher education in the United States has seen a dramatic expansion throughout the last century. The lecture, while intended for a broad audience, will offer an overview of the US Higher Education (HE) system from an economist’s perspective. It will undertake an analysis of HE’s operation as a marketplace. I will firstly survey the main distinctive features of an American university (admission, students’ choice of specialization, funding, tuition, placement, etc.).