Oleg Sobchuk
Main Research Areas
I study cultural evolution of the arts. That is, I test hypotheses about the historical change of various art forms: books, movies, songs, and video games. For example, does literature evolve one funeral at a time? Or, do founders of music genres have a first-mover advantage? The bigger goal of my research group is to help building a theory-driven science of culture. For my research, I assemble large historical datasets; I also rely on mathematical modeling of cultural processes, various forms of text and data mining, and Bayesian statistics.
Vita
Career and Education
2023–2026 | postdoctoral researcher, Bret Beheim’s lab, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. |
| 2018–2023 | postdoctoral researcher, Olivier Morin’s research group Minds and Traditions, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (renamed to Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology), Germany. |
| 2013–2018 | PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Tartu, Estonia. |
| 2011–2013 | M.A. in Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia. |
| 2007–2011 | B.A. in Philology, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. |
Research Grants
2026 | ERC Starting grant “MELT: Macroevolution of European Literature” (€1.5 million) – a project aimed to understand 200 years of European literary evolution using millions of digitized books. |
| 2023 | Phylogenies of Literature (€20,000) – a project funded by the Cultural Evolution Society’s Transformation Fund, aimed to pilot the methods for building dynamic networks of literary evolution. |
Projects
- ERC Project Macroevolution of European Literature (MELT)
The ERC-funded MELT project studies the macroevolution of European literature: the overarching patterns of intertextual influences in literary fiction between 1800 and 2000. ...