Visitors & guest researchers

July 2026 – December 2026

Natia Putkaradze has a PhD in Linguistics. She has held various academic positions at the different Universities, in 2016-2022 she has served as an associated professor at the Caucasus University (School of the Social Sciences and the Humanities). She teaches the conjugation system of the Georgian verb at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University and at the same time, she is the specialist at TSU office of academic research and development at the faculty of Humanities. She has spoken at numerous local as well as international academic conferences.

Her research interests include heritage language syntax, morphology, morpho-syntax, corpus linguistics, teaching Kartuli (Georgian) as a foreign and heritage Language. N. Putkaradze has authored scholarly papers about Ergative construction of the Kartvelian Verb, morpho-syntax and co-authored 2 text books. Within the JENA-CAUC project at Jena University she will work on Pear Story Corpus on the Kartvelian Data.

July 2026

Nino Gozalishvili is an academic specializing on studying nationalism and national identntity discourses,  far-right and populist mobilization, post-socialist transformations and questions of geopolitical alignment in in the South Caucasus and Eastern Europe. She holds a dual-accredited PhD in Comparative History with a specialization in Nationalism Studies from Central European University, Vienna. Currently a faculty member at the School of Social Sciences, the University of Georgia, Tbilisi. She is also a remote Research Fellow at the Marc Bloch Centre, Berlin, within the STEPPE project on entangled political imaginaries across East and West Europe and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.  

Research Profile:
Nino Gozalishvili is an academic specializing in nationalism, far-right politics, and post-socialist transformations, whose research examines the transnational spheres of far-right, national-populist discourses, and critical approaches to geopolitics and geopolitical alignment  in the post-Soviet space, with a sustained focus on Georgia. Her work combines qualitative interviews, social media discourse analysis, and historical methods. A further strand of her work addresses youth radicalization, digital mobilization, and civic resistance.

Her current project examines how external geopolitical categories ("Russia," "the West," "Europe," "China") are narrated and contested across the EU–Russia neighbourhood. Conceptualizing these categories as symbolic constructs and political imaginaries rather than fixed reference points, the project investigates how they shape political identities, security orientations, and democratic trajectories in post-socialist contexts.