Nina Dobrushina - Biography#

Nina Dobrushina has worked on the verbal categories of Nakh−Daghestanian languages and Russian in a typological perspective. She created detailed descriptions of the main forms and constructions expressing non−indicative moods in Russian, contributed to the new corpus−based grammar of Russian, and published a monograph on Russian subjunctive. She conducted typological studies of hortatives, optatives, and apprehensives, and co−authored two chapters of the World Atlas of Language Structures. She conducted extensive field research, mainly in Daghestan, and carried out detailed studies of the language ecology of several languages of Daghestan (Archi, Mehweb, Rutul). She designed a new field method of studying historical sociolinguistic processes, which was applied in numerous field trips involving students. She initiated and supervised the creation of several spoken corpora of Russian dialects.

Since 2001, she has been working at Higher School of Economics (HSE) University in Moscow, first as an assistant professor, then as a full professor. In 2016, together with Johanna Nichols (University of California, Berkeley) she won a grant to launch an international laboratory at the HSE University, a kind of national Centre of Excellence. In 2017 - 2022, she was co−heading this laboratory whose focus was on the processes of language convergence.

In March 2022, she left Russia for political reasons and resigned from HSE University.