I study long-term patterns in the history of various arts – literature, film, and music – using massive datasets and the theory of cultural evolution. I am interested in how and why various artistic forms get invented, how they succeed or fail, and how they get transmitted between generations of artists.
I studied literature and digital humanities in Kyiv (Ukraine), Tartu (Estonia), and Stanford (USA). Since 2018 I’ve been researching the evolution of arts at the Max Planck Society: first, in Olivier Morin’s lab at the MPI for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany), and now – alongside Bret Beheim at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany).
Contact
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Pl. 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
oleg_sobchuk -at- eva.mpg.de
Socials
Google Scholar | Twitter | Bluesky