On November 9, at 5:00 p.m. the International Research Centre for Georgian Studies at Caucasus University will host a public discussion and book presentation featuring Nana Sharikadze (Affiliated Associate Professor at Caucasus University) and Eka Kiknadze (Associate Professor at Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film Georgia State University), authors of a monograph supported by an internal research grant from Caucasus University.

The event will take place at Librarea, the bookshop on the first floor of Caucasus University.

About the Book

The monograph examines the period of Mikhail Vorontsov’s administration in Georgia and explores the cultural transformations of the mid-nineteenth century in the context of Russian imperial policy. Theatre and opera, the press and education, religious institutions and salon culture, the urban environment and visual culture were associated not only with modernization and the dissemination of European culture, but also served as instruments of imperial governance and integration.

Drawing on colonial and postcolonial studies, the monograph analyses these processes across epistemic, institutional and spatial dimensions. It addresses a central question: how could culture simultaneously create new opportunities and serve to strengthen political influence and facilitate imperial integration?

About the Authors

Nana Sharikadze is a musicologist and Doctor of Arts, and an affiliated academic at Caucasus University. Her research interests include the relationship between music and politics, Soviet music, cultural policy, and imperial and colonial legacies. Her work pays particular attention to Georgian music history and culture within broader East European, Russian and post-Soviet contexts.

Eka Kiknadze is an art historian and Doctor of Arts, and an affiliated academic at Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film Georgia State University. Her research interests include Georgian art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the relationship between art and ideology in the imperial and Soviet periods; cultural policy; colonial studies; and the history of museums and museum collections.

Registration: Those wishing to attend are requested to register via the link provided.