Irina Popova

Popova Irina Fedorovna (Russian: Ирина Федоровна Попова; born September 28, 1961) is a Russian sinologist and historian, Doctor of Sciences (2000), Director of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint-Petersburg (since April 2003), Head of the Department of Manuscripts and Documents of the IOM RAS, Full Professor in St Petersburg State University

Popova was a visiting scholar with the Center for Chinese Studies in Taipei (Taiwan), the Pennsylvania University (USA), School Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (Copenhagen, Denmark), Peking University (China).

Education

Popova graduated in 1983 from the St Petersburg State University, Faculty of Asian and African Studies, Department of the History of Far East; completed her Ph.D. in 1989 at Russian Academy of Sciences, holds Doctor of Sciences degree in history (2000) from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Subject of her Ph.D. thesis: “Rules for Emperors” (“Ti-fan”) by T'ang T'ai-tsung as a source on the Chinese Political Thought of the 7th century” (in Russian); subject of Doctoral thesis: “The Theory of the State Rulership in the Early T'ang China” (in Russian).

Research interests and major contributions

Chinese history and historiography; Dunhuang and Central Asian studies; political thought, government and administrative system of pre-modern China; Tang studies; history of Oriental studies; textual research; bibliography.

Basing primarily on the documents of the Tang dynasty, Popova has contributed into the study of the imperial rulership in medieval China and into the study of the interinfluence of the political practice and imperial ideology in pre-modern China; she has introduced into the academic use the original documents from Dunhuang and Turfan, Chinese epigraphic texts, visual sources on the history of Qing dynasty, archival material on the history of Russian expeditions in Central Asia and history of the Oriental studies

Publications

200 articles, 5 monographs (3 in cooperation with other researchers) and 10 edited collections of articles

Membership in Editorial Boards

Head of the Editorial Board of the periodicals: “Pis’mennye pamiatniki Vostoka”, “Written Monuments of the Orient”, “Strany i narody Vostoka” (“Countries and Peoples of Orient”), “Tulufan janjiu”, “Minzu guji yanjiu”, “Zhongguo lishi gudai wenxian” (China), “Studia Orientalia Slovaca” (University of Bratislava, Slovakia), “Shygys-Orient” (Kazakhstan); Deputy Head of the Editorial Board of the academic series “Pamiatniki pismennosti Vostoka’ (Written Monuments in the Oriental Scripts)

Awards

2013 – St Petersburg City Government Prize in science and engineering (Prize in philology named after S.F. Oldenburg); 2016 – Honorary rank “Yangzi Scholar” 长江学者by Ministry of Education of China. Honorary Professor of Lanzhou University (China), Ningxia University (China), Shandong University (China), Minzu University of China (Beijing, China), Shaanxi Normal University (Xi'an, China); honorary doctor of the Institute of History of the Academy of Social Sciences of China