What is Irina Popova?
'''Popova Irina Fedorovna''' ({{lang-ru|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|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