Tbilisi 2026

Zaal Andronikashvili

Zaal Andronikashvili is a literary scholar and research fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin and professor at Ilia State University in Tbilisi. His work combines literary theory with the literary and cultural history of Georgia in the context of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet period, as well as with imperial and colonial constellations in the Caucasus and the Black Sea region. He is the author of several books and a contributor to the German press.

Zsófia Bán

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Zsófia Bán is a Hungarian writer, essayist and critic, as well as a public intellectual. She has received a number of local and international prizes and residencies. She was a DAAD Artist-in-Residence in Berlin in 2015-16, in 2021 she received the Spycher Literature Prize in Switzerland. Her most recent book, Aletheia Lives, a novel, is coming out in English translation next year. She is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest.

Nutsa Batiashvili

Nutsa Batiashvili is a professor of Anthropology, the Dean of the Graduate School and the Director of “Memory and Anxiety Research Lab” at the Free University of Tbilisi (PhD Washington University in St Louis). Her research projects include anthropology of anxiety, collective memory, national narratives.  She is the author of The Bivocal Nation: Memory and Identity on the Edge of Empire (2018) and the editor of two special collections: the Anthropology of Anxiety (2025); Memory and Anxiety (2025).

Nino Doborjginidze

Nino Doborjginidze, PhD, earned her doctorate in Linguistics in 1988. She held research fellowships at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and conducted research at several German universities and at the historical archives of Propaganda Fide in Italy. Since 2006, she has worked at Ilia State University, becoming Full Professor in 2010, Vice-Rector for Research (2017–2021), and has served as Rector since 2022 to the present.

Peter Englund

Peter Englund, born in 1957, is swedish historian and professor. Took his PhD at Uppsala University in 1989. Has written mainly on 17th Century and 20th Century history. Among his works are Poltava, The Beauty and the Sorrow and November 1942. Has also been reporting from several wars, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine. Since 2002 a member of the Royal Swedish Academy (who appoints the Nobel Prize for Literature) and 2009-2015 he was the Permanent Secretary of that body. His books have been translated into 28 languages.

Carl Henrik Fredriksson

Carl Henrik Fredriksson is a Swedish editor, essayist and translator living in Vienna. He is the Programme Director of Debates on Europe and co-founder of Eurozine, whose editor-in-chief and president he was until 2015. Fredriksson was also the editor-in-chief of Sweden’s oldest cultural journal Ord&Bild.

Karl Schlögel

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Karl Schlögel is a german historian, writer and professor emeritus of East European History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). His books have been translated into many languages, including Ukraine. Nation on the Borderlands (2018), The Soviet Century (2021), The Scent of Empires. Chanel No.5 and Red Moscow (2022) or Auf der Sandbank der Zeit (2025 / tr. On the Sandbank of Time). He is a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature. Last year he received the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Dubravka Stojanović

Dubravka Stojanović is a historian and professor at Belgrade University. Her work focuses on democracy in Serbia and the Balkans, the interpretation of history in textbooks, social history, the process of modernisation, and the history of women in Serbia. She is vice-president of the History Education Committee and a consultant to the United Nations, working on issues concerning history, memory, and the misuse of history in education. She is the founder and curator of the Museum of the ninties in Belgrade.

Volker Weichsel

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Volker Weichsel is a political scientist with a focus on Central Eastern and Eastern Europe. He is an editor of the Berlin-based magazine OSTEUROPA, which focuses on politics, economics, and culture across all Eastern Europe. He is also a translator from Russian, French and Czech. Most recently was published: Maksim Znak, Zekamerone. Geschichten aus dem Gefängnis (2023).

Giga Zedenia

Giga Zedania is a professor of philosophy and director of the Centre for Advanced Studies at Ilia State University, where he also served as rector from 2014 to 2022. He studied philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies in Georgia, the United States, Hungary, and Germany, and has authored and edited numerous publications in Georgian, English and German. His research interests include intellectual history, the philosophy and history of higher education, and the societal and cultural transitions of post-socialist countries.