Project Team

Lebanidze Bidzina Lebanidze Bidzina Image: Lebanidze Bidzina

Dr. Bidzina Lebanidze

Project Leader and Principal Investigator

Dr. Bidzina Lebanidze is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Slavic Studies and Caucasus Studies. His research interests include EU Foreign and Security Policy, International Relations and Global Governance.

Email: bidzina.lebanidze@uni-jena.de 

Diana Forker Diana Forker Image: Diana Forker

Prof. Dr. Diana Forker

Project Leader and Principal Investigator

Research areas of Prof. Dr. Diana Forker include East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) and West Caucasian languages, grammatical description and functional linguistics sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as well as language typology and areal linguistics.

Email: diana.forker@uni-jena.de 

Tiffany Williams Tiffany Williams Image: Tiffany Williams

Dr. Tiffany G. Williams

Postdoctoral Researcher

Tiffany G. Williams is a postdoctoral researcher in the “Resilience in the South Caucasus: prospects and challenges of a new EU foreign policy concept” project. Her postdoctoral work focuses on resilience in EU-funded public administration support initiatives implemented in the South Caucasus. She earned her PhD at Universität Wien while a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Institut für Höhere Studien, and earned a Master of Public Administration at Cornell University.

Email: tiff.gw@gmail.com 

Veronika Pfeilschifter Veronika Pfeilschifter Image: Veronika Pfeilschifter

Veronika Pfeilschifter

Doctoral Researcher

Veronika Pfeilschifter is a doctoral candidate and research associate at the Institute for Caucasus Studies and focuses on the research cluster societal resilience. Her PhD project, preliminary entitled ‘Ideology, utopia and decolonial resilience - The new post-Soviet left in the South Caucasus’ explores the intersection between youth groups, leftist political ideologies and resilience in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Veronika holds a Master’s degree from the IMCEERES (Central, Eastern European, Russian & Eurasian studies) graduate program at University of Glasgow, University of Tartu and Ilia State University (2018-2021). She is a political scientist and ethnologist by training.

Email: v.pfeilschifter@uni-jena.de 

Irena Gonashvili Irena Gonashvili Image: Jens Meyer (University of Jena)

Irena Gonashvili

Doctoral Researcher

Irena Gonashvili holds the Master’s degree in Political Sciences from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and the Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University.
Ms. Gonashvili is the doctoral researcher in the project and intends to research the Europeanization of environmental and climate change policies in Georgia and Armenia. 

Email: irena.gonashvili@uni-jena.de

Nikita Divekar Nikita Divekar Image: Nikita Divekar

Nikita Divekar

Student Assistant 

Nikita Divekar is currently pursuing her Bachelors in Political Science with a specialization in comparative politics and international relations. In the future she hopes to be a part of humanitarian and stabilization missions and have the opportunity to work in crisis zones.

Email: nikita.divekar@uni-jena.de 

Tim Zielke Tim Zielke Image: Tim Zielke

Tim Zielke

Student Assistant 

Tim Zielke has finished his Bachelor in Communication Science and Psychology and is currently writing his Masterthesis with the title „Strategic Communication in Hybrid Warfare" in order to receive his MA degree in Public Communication.

Email: tim.zielke@uni-jena.de