GEORGIAN LANGUAGE & CULTURE

Course Instructors

Shorena Kurtsikidze holds a Doctorate in Ethnology/Cultural Anthropology from the Institute of History and Ethnology, Georgian National Academy of Sciences, and has a Master's Degree in History and Social Sciences from Tbilisi State University, where she was a student of the History Department and the recipient of a prestigious Ivane Javakhishvili scholarship and graduated with the Diploma of Honor. She also holds a Graduate Degree in Simultaneous Interpreting from the Institute of Foreign Languages and Literature of Tbilisi. Her special interests include Ethnolinguistic and Cross-Cultural Studies. She has done extensive fieldwork in the Caucasus, Turkey, and India, where she was an exchange student at the University of Mumbai (formerly University of Bombay) and also conducted her research at the K.R. Cama Oriental Institute. She was a postdoctoral Fulbright visiting scholar at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, where she taught the Georgian Language and Culture course in 1994-95 and 1999-2000. From 2001, she has taught both the beginning and intermediate Georgian at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She has taught the Georgian Folklore course at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Vakhtang Chikovani holds a Doctorate in Ethnology/Cultural Anthropology and a Master's Degree in Journalism and is a former Head of Department of the Ethnology of Caucasus at the Institute of History and Ethnology, Georgian National Academy of Sciences.

He has taught various courses in anthropology, directed many ethnographic expeditions and conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in different regions of the Caucasus, Bulgaria, and Turkey. He taught the Georgian Language course from 2003 to 2009 at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley.