Seminar: “Representations of Collective Memory in Georgia, Armenia, Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh”. Bartłomiej Krzysztan in conversation with Gayane Shagoyan and Malkhaz Toria

At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Bartłomiej Krzysztan discusses his book Representations of Collective Memory in Georgia, Armenia, Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh. The Political, Memory and Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) with Gayane Shagoyan and Malkhaz Toria.

Zoom link: https://lmu-munich.zoom-x.de/j/61182078743?pwd=TEpTM1BGRGZueXkyekpTaGpvU2tMUT09

About the book

The book is a unique proposal for an integral description of memory regimes in the South Caucasus region, covering both the independent states of Armenia and Georgia, but also the separatist entities created as a result of the turbulent changes of the early 1990s — Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Being a transdisciplinary proposal, encompassing the perspectives of political science, history and social anthropology, the book may be of interest to researchers from different academic disciplines. At the same time, due to its narrative form, it can also be an interesting proposal for students of eastern studies, allowing for a fuller understanding of the dynamics of political change in the post-Soviet space. The comprehensive and integral approach to the issue of analysing and interpreting collective memory through the prism of its representation, presented in the form of an anthropological story based on case studies, may also be of interest to those not associated with institutional Academia.

Author

Bartłomiej Krzysztan, PhD in political science, assistant professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He graduated in political science from Université Libre de Bruxelles and in political science and cultural studies from the University of Wroclaw. He works on political anthropology, cultural and political memory, the issues of genocide, post-colonialism, and national and ethnic identity and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. Holder of a the scholarship at the Ilia Chavchavadze State University in Tbilisi and Raphael Lemkin scholarship at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan, as well as a scholarship from the Minister of Science for outstanding young scientists and an award from the Polish Science Foundation. Author of books and articles on memory and history and on the politicization of the Global East’s past.

Discussants

Gayane Shagoyan is a senior researcher at the Department of Contemporary Anthropological Studies of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia (IAE NAS RA). She received her PhD in anthropology from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in 2010. The areas of her research interests include daily life, urban studies, and anthropology of memory. She is the author of about 90 publications including Seven Days and Seven Nights: Panorama of the Armenian Wedding (Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2011, in Armenian), co-author of Stalin Era Repressions in Armenia: History, Memory, and Daily Life (Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2015, in Armenian), and the editor of Unheard Voices: Memory and Post-Memory in Oral History (Yerevan: IAE Press, 2018).

Malkhaz Toria (Ph.D. 2009) is an Associate Professor of history and the director of the Memory Studies Center in the Caucasus at Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia). He is also a doctoral candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research (NYC, The USA). His research interests focus on theories of history and the epistemology of historical knowledge; Tsarist and Soviet imperial legacies and the politics of identity, belonging, and boundary-making in contemporary Georgia; politics of memory and dealing with the totalitarian past in post-Soviet societies; modern museology and memorial culture; the instrumentalization of history and politics of exclusion and ethnic cleansing in Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia/Tskhinvali. He has held fellowships (Fulbright, DAAD, OSF, etc.) at the New School for Social Research, Central European University (CEU), Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL), Humboldt University of Berlin, University of California, Berkeley, the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

Date

Oct 06 2025
Expired!

Time

5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Go to Top