The third Georgia-Oxford Forum

Announcing the Third Georgia-Oxford Forum organised by the Embassy of Georgia to the UK in partnership with the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) and Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia.

The annual forum serves as a dynamic platform, enhancing partnership initiatives between Georgia and the UK, and calls on expertise from across the academic disciplines, including but not limited to political science, international relations, history, literature, archaeology, cinematography, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, economics and business.

This event is open to the public. Please register here. 

Image courtesy of Maryam Mumuladze

Programme

9:30am-10:00 pm: Coffee and Tea

10:00am-10:15 am: Welcome and introduction

·      Professor Paul Chaisty, Head of Oxford School of Global and Area Studies

·      Sophie Katsarava MBE, Ambassador of Georgia to the UK

·      Dr Zbigniew Wojnowski, Head of the Georgian Studies Programme at OSGA

Panel I

10:15 am-11:15am: Georgia’s Relations with the EU and UK in a Changing Geopolitical Landscape

The speakers will discuss Georgia’s current relations with the EU and UK amid a dynamic geopolitical landscape in the region. The Ambassador will summarise Georgia’s current policy on European integration and enhanced ties with the UK. Professor Roy Allisson will speak about Georgia’s current Euro-Atlantic perspectives. Based on a chapter on Georgia from his most recent book on political technologies, Professor Andrew Wilson will discuss current challenges to Georgia’s European integration. Finally, Dr Max Fras will focus on EU-Georgia relations in the sphere of youth policy.

Chair: Professor Paul Chaisty

·      Sophie Katsarava MBE, Ambassador of Georgia to the UK

·      Professor Roy Allison, Director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre at Oxford

·      Professor Andrew Wilson, University College London

·      Dr Max Fras, London School of Economics

Panel 2

11:15-12:15: Keynote Speech - ‘‘Georgia's Contested European Trajectory: Instrumentalisation of Europeanisation Discourses by Political and Media Actors’’

Professor Lia Tsuladze, Tbilisi State University

12:15-13:15 Lunch

Panel 3

13:15-14:15: Cultural and Public Diplomacy

The third panel will focus on different research and cultural projects and initiatives at the University of Oxford that are aimed at the in-depth study and promotion of Georgian culture, history and language. This year’s Georgian Fellows Dr Teona Lomsadze and Dr Svetlana Berikashvili, funded by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia, will present their research projects at Oxford. Teona’s project is focused on the study of Georgian folk music in the UK while Svetlana is working on the description and digitalisation of Bodleian manuscripts of Georgian grammar and language studies. Alexander Sherborne will be speaking about the research trip of the Oxford University Byzantine Society to Georgia and the prospects for Medieval Georgian Studies at Oxford. Finally, Dr Anna Wilson will present a new and advanced pipeline of tools for analysing human communication at speed and scale with the focus on the comparative study of Georgian speech and co-speech gesture in media. This research forms part of the international project “World Futures: Multimodal Viewpoint Construction by Russian International Media” which Dr Wilson co-leads, and may be of interest to researchers from humanities and social sciences working with Georgian videos.

Chair: Zbigniew Wojnowski, Head of the Georgian Studies Programme at OSGA

·      Dr Teona Lomsadze, Georgian Studies Fellow at Oxford

·      Dr Svetlana Berikashvili, Georgian Studies Fellow at Oxford

·      Alexander Sherborne, DPhil Student at Oxford & the President of the Oxford University Byzantine Society

·      Dr Anna Wilson, Director of the International Multimodal Communication Centre at Oxford

Panel 4

14:15-15:00: Georgian Studies Program at Harvard University

At the fourth panel, Professor Stephen Jones will introduce the newly-established Georgian Studies Programme at Harvard University and various research initiatives and projects there. Then Alex Jackson, a PhD Student at Harvard University, who also studies Georgian language there, will present his doctoral project ‘Our Brothers Across the Mountains: A History of Black Georgians’.

·      Professor Stephen Jones, Head of the Georgian Studies Programme at Harvard University

·      Alex Jackson, PhD Student at Harvard University

Panel 5

15:00-16:00: Book launch: The translation of Goderdzi Chokheli’s ‘Human Sadness’

The fifth panel will be dedicated to the recent translation of Goderdzi Chokheli’s Human Sadness completed by the Oxford Georgian Translation Project run by Lia Chokoshvili. Lia and the translators involved in the project will talk about the translation process. After that, Maya Jaggi will discuss the translations of Georgian literature in the context of soft power.

Chair: Professor Dan Healey, Professor of Modern Russian History at Oxford

·      Lia Chokoshvili, Georgian Programme Language Instructor and the Head of the Translation Project at Oxford

·      Margaret Miller, translator

·      Ollie Matthews, translator

·      Walker Thompson, translator

·      Geoffrey Gosby, translator

·      Clifford Marcus, translator

·      Maya Jaggi, an award-winning journalist and contributing art critic for FT

 16:00-16:30 Coffee break

Panel 6

16:30-17:30: Georgian Scholars and Students at Oxford

At the final panel, Georgian professors and students at the University of Oxford will discuss their current work and experience here. 

Chair: TBC

·      Dr Tamar Koplatadze, Associate Professor in Postsocialist Literature and Culture at Oxford

·      Professor Maia Chankseliani, Associate Professor of Comparative and International Education at Oxford

·      Sophia Maisashvili, President of Georgian Society at Oxford

·      Luka Shanidze, student at Oxford

·      Miriam Yakobashvili, student at Oxford

17:30-18:30: Georgian wine reception