Dinara Dubrovskaya: Forty Years in Oriental Studies. Part I

This first part of the interview with Dr Dinara V. Dubrovskaya — a Sinologist, art critic, journalist and author, editor-in-chief of the Oriental Courier magazine and, since 2021, head of the Department of Oriental History at IOS RAS — is timed to coincide with her 60th anniversary. The conversation touches on questions of education in Asiatic studies at the Institute of Asian and African Countries at the Lomonosov Moscow State University; the role of Oriental studies in society in the late 20th and early 21st centuries; and some peculiarities of the development of Oriental studies in the Soviet and post-Soviet times. The interview talks about the most prominent scholars Dr Dubrovskaya worked with, the special aspects of Oriental studies, and raises some controversial questions of gatekeeping in humanities, as well as the global phenomena of Orientalism and “Occidentalism”.