Exciting news! 🎉 Our podcast, "А теперь по-русски," is now live on all the main streaming platforms: Spotify and Apple Podcasts!

🟢 Spotify
🟣 Apple Podcasts

Hosted by Sergei Shtyrkov, the Director of the Anthropology Program, we have brand new episodes on the way! Follow our channel now and turn on notifications so you catch all the updates as they drop.

In this episode of the “Now in Russian” podcast, we spoke with Ekaterina Pravilova. Ekaterina is a professor of history at Princeton University. She specializes in the history of the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union, the history of currencies and law. She has been the director of Princeton’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and is currently running the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.

Listen to the podcast 🎙
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• YouTube

Curious about how Sovietness was constructed—and how its legacies still shape our world today? Our third summer school in the “Societies and Cultures Torn Apart” series invites graduate students and advanced undergraduates to explore “Constructing Soviet Difference: Culture and Society.”

Join us to discuss how categories of difference were conceptualized, produced, and lived across the Soviet century and how their legacies continue to shape the present. This program offers lectures, seminars, and hands-on workshops on academic writing and masterclasses in disciplinary frameworks (anthropology, history, and cultural studies), all led by leading scholars in the field.

📝 Applications are now open! To learn more about the summer school's program, thematic sections, list of instructors, and scholarship opportunities, visit the summer school website.

🗓 Dates: June 29–July 8, 2026
📍Location: Gyumri, Armenia
✏️ Application Deadline: January 18, 2026, 23:59 GMT+4

Our second annual Y-Conference: SPACES will take place on May 22-24, 2026, in Yerevan. The event encourages interdisciplinary exploration of space as a theoretical object, a lived experience, and a site of power, memory, resistance, and transformation.

We invite scholars from across the social sciences, humanities, and related fields to submit their panel session proposals by December 15, 2025. Hurry up!

🔗 Learn more about the conference and application process.

Selected panel sessions will be included in the general Call for Individual Papers, where scholars can propose their abstracts.

YCIE Director Jeanne Kormina recently appeared as a guest on the podcast show “Unfiltered History,” hosted by historian Suren Manukyan. The interview focused on Anthropology in general, discussing its connection to colonialism. Professor Kormina also took the opportunity to introduce the Yerevan Center for International Education (YCIE), including its mission and ongoing projects.

Special thanks to Suren Manukyan and the Business FM radio channel for the invitation.

In this episode of the “Now in Russian” podcast, we spoke with Svetlana Gorshenina, a historian and art historian. Svetlana works at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris (EUR’ORBEM, CNRS/Sorbonne Université). Her work focuses primarily on the history of Turkestan from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, as well as on the early years of Soviet rule in the region. Her research spans a wide range of topics related to the history of ideas and cultural heritage, and she is currently working extensively on the history of photography in Russian Turkestan.

Listen to the podcast 🎙
• Apple Podcasts
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• YouTube

Hello everyone!

We sincerely regret to inform you that tomorrow's public lecture, "Computations and Experiments: How AI Is Introduced in Laboratory Sciences," presented by Andrei Kuznetsov, has been CANCELED.

The event has been rescheduled for February 2026.

We will share the exact new date here on social media.

We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause.

Best Regards,
YCIE Team

Aleksandr Veselov, PhD, an independent researcher, specializes in public history, digital anthropology, memory, and game studies. In his public lecture, Veselov will examine how both Russian high-budget state productions and independent developer teams present their own versions and perceptions of the country’s history, memory, and past.

📅 December 19, 2025
⏰ 6:00 pm
📍 3 Aram Khachatryan, Yerevan

Learn More and Register!

Join us in an hour!
Aleksandr Veselov's lecture will also be available on Zoom.
“Serious and Absurd Games: Competing Uses of the Past in Russian Video Games.”

📅 November 19, 2025
🕖 6 pm (GMT+4)
🔗 Link

Learn more about the public lecture!

YCIE welcomes scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and related fields to submit paper abstracts for the second Y-Conference: SPACES.

Deadline – February 8, 2026

Learn more about how to submit your paper!

We are excited to welcome our research fellow Luka Nakhutsrishvili to the board as he begins a three-month stay at YCIE in Yerevan in frames of Research Fellowship Program 2025-2026.

Luka teaches critical theory at Ilia State University in Tbilisi and works as a researcher and project coordinator at its Institute for Social and Cultural Research. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Universities of Tübingen and Perpignan.

At YCIE, Luka examines the “theater-caravanserai,” a mid-19th-century building in Russian-ruled Tiflis that uniquely combined the region’s first European-style proscenium theater with a multistory trade center, fostering an uneasy coexistence among Armenian merchants, Italian opera singers, Russian theater actors, tsarist bureaucrats, and Georgian aristocrats.

Dear YCIE Community,

What a year it has been! While the world has faced immense challenges, 2025 was a year of unprecedented growth for YCIE. Our calendar was packed with new projects and a record number of applications.

We achieved amazing results across all our initiatives, old and new. Our numbers on social media grew immensely; many of you joined our newsletter and stayed with us throughout the year. This is a success we certainly don’t take for granted. Our deepest gratitude goes to all of you who attended our events or showed interest in our work. Your engagement is a testament to the importance of our mission, to the value of the social sciences and humanities, and to how much Armenia continues to captivate researchers from around the globe.

Here’s to peace, health, and science! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 🧡

In this episode, we speak with Armenologist and anthropologist Anatolii Tokmantsev. He currently holds the position of Professor of Global and Armenian History in the Department of Armenian Studies at Péter Pázmány Catholic University in Budapest. His scholarly interests include religious diversity in contemporary Armenia, the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Armenian diaspora, as well as new religious movements in East Asia. In his current research, he pays particular attention to state policies toward religious groups and organizations, the analysis of manifestations of religious intolerance, and the study of language change within the Armenian diaspora.

Listen to the podcast 🎙
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📢 10 days left to apply for the YCIE Summer School “Constructing Soviet Difference: Culture and Society!”

Dates: June 29 – July 8, 2026
Location: Gyumri, Armenia
Application Deadline: January 18, 2026, 23:59 GMT+4

👉 Learn more about the opportunity!

In case of any questions, contact us: [email protected]