Biography
Luka Nakhutsrishvili teaches critical theory at Ilia State University in Tbilisi and works as a researcher and project coordinator at its Institute for Social and Cultural Research. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Universities of TĂĽbingen and Perpignan. His research and teaching have been hosted by the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, Goethe University Frankfurt, New York University, the Center for Advanced Study Sofia, and the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig.
Positioned at the crossroads of cultural and literary studies, history, philosophy, anthropology, and political theory, Luka investigates projects of modernity, practices of resistance, and revolutionary culture in Georgia and the Caucasus.
At YCIE, Luka examines the “theater-caravanserai,” a mid-19th-century building in Russian-ruled Tiflis that uniquely combined the region’s first European-style proscenium theater with a multistory trade center, fostering an uneasy coexistence among Armenian merchants, Italian opera singers, Russian theater actors, tsarist bureaucrats, and Georgian aristocrats. This research project blends cultural and political history, ethnography, opera studies, and literary analysis to highlight the dreams of infrastructural modernization and cultural improvement that this hybrid building both embodied and hindered, making “the theater-caravanserai” a key material site for exploring the contradictory ways in which modernity was experienced on the Russian Empire’s Caucasian edge.