Bela Tsipuria
Bela Tsipuria - Professor of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Institute of Comparative Literature at Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. She graduated with honors from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Department of Philology, and earned there her PhD in Georgian Literature (1993). She worked there as n associate professor in 1993-2004. She was a researcher at Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature. She has been a visiting scholar at Lund University, Sweden (1994) and at Pennsylvania State University, USA (2002- 2003); she was a Thesaurus Poloniae fellow at the ICC, Krakow, Poland (2011) and a Weiser Fellow at University of Michigan (2018). She was Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Georgia from 2004–2008, coordinating state programs in the spheres of Higher, Vocational and General Education, and Civic Integration. She works at Ilia State University since 2008. She supervises undergraduate and graduate programs in Literary Studies and Georgian Philology. She was a member of the subject group in Literary Studies in EU Project Tuning Educational Structures in Europe (2011-2012). She has published up to 70 research papers in international and Georgian academic editions. She participates in international conferences, and organizes international conferences at Ilia State University. She is a member of the Georgian Comparative Literature Association, European Society of Comparative Literature ESCL and of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM). She is a specialist in 20 th -century Georgian literature and comparative literature, focusing on intercultural contacts; modernist/avant-garde, and postmodernist movements; as well as Soviet ideological influences and postcolonialism.