Professor Jeff Sahadeo’s (Carlton University, Canada) seminar on “Memory, Significance: Mtkvari and Other Rivers of Georgia” will be held at Ilia State University within the “Tbilisi as an Urban Intersection” project (funded by the Rustaveli Science Foundation) on June 10, at 17:00.

About the Seminar

Rivers function as critical markers of place and identity in Georgia. In initial interviews focused on the role of rivers in Soviet-era environmental damage and activism, energy and nationalism, I was struck to hear respondents speak most passionately about what the rivers meant to their daily lives, from childhood—a finding supported in initial research into Soviet-era newspapers.  This paper will collect early evidence and findings of cultural meanings of rivers as Georgians wrote about and/or remembered the Soviet period, and how they use those memories when thinking about today.  I will show that these meanings date from before the USSR, as the Kura/Mtkvari also held deep cultural meanings in imperial Tiflis.

About the Speaker

Professor Jeff Sahadeo received his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2000. He joined Carleton after three years teaching at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. His teaching interests include diaspora, migration, and empire in Eastern Europe and Asia. He also works on issues of colonialism, nationality, frontiers, and borders in relations of power and the creation of identities and states. A specialist on the Caucasus and Central Asia, Dr. Sahadeo has conducted extensive work in several countries of the region.

Dr. Sahadeo’s current research focuses on the intersection between nature and society, movement and social change through a study of rivers in the Republic of Georgia. He is also researching post-conflict peacebuilding through pluralism in Eurasia.

Time: June 10, 17:00.

Working Language: English

Location: A306 Auditorium

2022