Max Weber Stiftung - Georgia Branch Office

01/10/2026

📢 Check out CfA for our Research Scholarship 2027.1 (1-3 months)

🔗 Find all details here: https://mwseasteurope.hypotheses.org/14569

22/09/2026

📢Call for Papers – Maritime (Dis)Connect. Ports in Global Imperial Crisis, 1904-1925

Date: March 4–5, 2027, Tbilisi

Submission Deadline: 6 November 2026

Organizer: Azat Bilalutdinov (Max Weber Foundation – Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO))

In the nineteenth century, steam globalization drove the rapid growth of port cities as cosmopolitan hubs connecting distant productive “hinterlands” to world markets. At the same time, this connectivity heightened security concerns of imperial states. As circuits of transnational mobility and exchange, ports were particularly susceptible to urban unrest, political radicalization, and mutiny. In wartime, ports emerged as crucial nodes of military logistics and therefore as primary targets of naval attack and blockade.

This workshop examines ports not primarily as cosmopolitan hubs of exchange, but as sites where connectivity could be mobilized, constrained, and weaponized. It asks how the dense concentration of commerce, transport networks, diverse populations, and ideas made port cities especially vulnerable to the pressures of war and revolution.

We are particularly interested in papers addressing the following themes:
▪️Wartime mobilization of commercial infrastructure;
▪️War nationalism: enemy alien regimes, ethnic violence and expropriation;
▪️Economic warfare: blockades and boycotts;
▪️Contraband and smuggling;
▪️Emergency rule: military occupation, policing and surveillance;
▪️Food, fuel and supply crises in port cities;
▪️Public health, epidemics and sanitary control
▪️Displacement and migration: Refugees, POWs and civilian internees;

Submission Deadline: 6 November 2026
Notification of acceptance: 30 November 2026

✉️ Please send your proposal as a single PDF file, including your name, affiliation, presentation title, abstract (300 words max.), and a short CV (2 pages max) to [email protected] with [Maritime (dis)connect] in the subject line.

For further questions contact: Dr. Azat Bilalutdinov [email protected]

🔎 Read the full CfP here: https://mwsgeorgia.hypotheses.org/14869

22/09/2026

Check out our upcoming conference "Confronting Musical Diversity in Western and Central Eurasian Empires during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries", organized by our colleague, Jonas Löffler (Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa).

International Conference | September 23–25, 2026 | Tbilisi

🔗 Find more about the conference and see the program below:

International Conference Organized by Jonas Löffler | September 23–25, 2026 | Tbilisi

15/09/2026

We welcome Kai Willms, who joins our Tbilisi office as a new fellow straight from his MWNO - Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa Fellow Residency in Vilnius.

Kai Johann Willms is a postdoctoral fellow at the Chair for Eastern European History at the University of Basel. He holds a BA in History and Political Science from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (2013), an MA in Modern European History from the Humboldt University of Berlin (2016) and a PhD in Eastern and Southeastern European History from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2023).

In his ongoing second book project, he compares the history of urban development in three different peripheries of the late Russian Empire, focusing in particular on the dynamic interplay of local agency and imperial initiatives of urban ‘modernisation’.

🤩 Our team wishes Kai an interesting and productive time in Tbilisi!

See more about his biography and research: https://mwseasteurope.hypotheses.org/dr-des-kai-johann-willms

📢 MWNO FELLOWS – this month, we welcome TWO new MWNO Resident Fellows to !

👨‍🎓One is Kai Willms who comes to Vilnius from the Universität Basel where he serves as postdoctoral assistant at the Chair for East European History.

📌 After defending a PhD dissertation on transcultural knowledge production during the Cold War, he now embarked on a PostDoc project dealing with imperial visions and local dynamics of urban modernisation in the ‘peripheral metropolises’ Vilnius, Tbilisi and Tashkent.

📍 After spending the summer as a MWNO Resident Fellow in Vilnius he will continue his stint with our network at our office in Tbilisi, the Max Weber Stiftung - Georgia Branch Office

🔎 As part of his fellowship, Kai is also convening the ‘Imperial Urbanism in Northeastern Europe. Spaces, Infrastructures and Transimperial Entanglements in the Long Nineteenth Century‘ workshop in Vilnius. Check out the CfP here: https://mwsosteuropa.hypotheses.org/17937

To learn more about Kai’s research, go to: https://mwsosteuropa.hypotheses.org/fellows-2

11/09/2026

We welcome Arpine Maniero, our new fellow at Tbilisi office of the MWNO - Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa.

Arpine Maniero is a research associate at the Collegium Carolinum e. V., a research institute for the history of the Czech lands and Slovakia, where she is responsible for digitization and electronic publishing. Her research focuses on the history of the South Caucasus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on Armenia.

She completed her doctoral dissertation at the Chair of East and Southeast European History at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her dissertation examined Armenian students at German and Swiss universities from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. Her doctoral research was partly supported by a DAAD scholarship. The book based on her dissertation was published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2020. Her current research project deals with the transformation of borderlands in the South Caucasus from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, with a particular focus on territorial enclosure, infrastructure, mobility, and access to resources in the Armenian-Azerbaijani borderlands.

🤩 Our team wishes Arpine an interesting and productive time in Tbilisi!

See more about her biography and research: https://mwsgeorgia.hypotheses.org/arpine-maniero

10/09/2026

We welcome Azat Bilalutdinov, our new fellow at Tbilisi office of the MWNO - Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa.

His research focuses on maritime history of the Russian empire/Soviet Union and its entanglements with the Middle East. Azat received his doctorate from Columbia University (United States of America) in 2026. His book project is a transimperial history of the Black Sea region in global war, revolution and state succession (1911-1926). It explores how maritime shipping, trade and business contributed to and were affected by wars and revolution.

His second project focuses on the maritime borders of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. It examines how empires transformed seas and oceans into spaces of territorial sovereignty, and how modern legal concepts such as internal waters, the territorial sea, and the exclusive economic zone emerged from maritime practices including warfare, commerce, and scientific exploration.

🤩 Our team wishes him an interesting and productive time in Tbilisi!

See more about Azat Bilalutdinov's biography and research: https://mwsgeorgia.hypotheses.org/azat-bilalutdinov

07/09/2026

📢 TRAVEL GRANTS / DEADLINE IN 8 WEEKS
CfA: Gerald D. Feldman Travel Grants by the Max Weber Stiftung

🏛 You want to go to the archives to do research on Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia? Or do research elsewhere?

🍀 One opportunity to do so is with scholarships of the MWNO branches in Helsinki, Vilnius and Tbilisi. Another is to apply for a Gerald D. Feldman Travel Grant at the Max Weber Foundation.

📌 The Gerald D. Feldman Travel Grants offer up to THREE ONE-month research trips to at least TWO and at most THREE countries. They are meant to improve the career opportunities for humanities and social science academics in their qualification phase. Among other places, you could conduct research in , , , and

Scholars of any nationality may apply, there is no age restriction.

🏁 This year`s application deadline is October 4th, 2026.

🔗 For more info on the MWS Gerald D. Feldman Travel Grants go to https://mwseasteurope.hypotheses.org/11434 or www.maxweberstiftung.de/travel-grants

🔗 For information about opportunities provided by the MWNO go to https://mwseasteurope.hypotheses.org/opportunities

02/09/2026

📢 Call for Papers – Paths Not Taken: Forgotten (?!) (Non-)Territorial Entities in the Early Soviet Union

Date: February 25–27, 2027, Tbilisi

Submission Deadline: 20 October 2026

Organizer: Davit Jishkariani (Max Weber Foundation – Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO)
Co-organizer: Jörn Happel (Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg)

During the early decades of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union undertook a massive project of defining, institutionalizing, and mapping nationality. Grounded in the structural principles of territoriality, economic viability, and demographic/ethnographic composition, this era witnessed the creation of numerous territorial entities across the vast expanse of the early Soviet Union. Centered on the idea of nativization/indigenization (korenizatsiia), Soviet nationalities policy encouraged diverse ethnic groups to develop their own administrative, political, and cultural institutions. These formations varied significantly, reflecting distinct linguistic, cultural, geographic, and economic realities.

The aim of this workshop is to introduce new conceptual frameworks and newly discovered accessible archival material into scholarly debates/discussions surrounding/regarding the historical trajectories, structural transformations, and contemporary resonance of early Soviet ethno-territorial entities.
We invite contributions from historians, political scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and scholars in related fields that explore how these formations were conceptualized, contested, dismantled, and commemorated.

We welcome contributions addressing various geographical regions, scales of analysis, and chronological frameworks. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
▪️ Official and unofficial reasons behind the creation of territorial entities: the visions of the Soviet center and the role of local agency
▪️ The role of personalities and negotiations in the formation of political units
▪️ The influence of foreign actors in shaping these entities
▪️ Internal dynamics and official and unofficial policies behind the dissolution of the (non)-territorial formations
▪️ Memory, commemoration, and reinterpretation of these entities in historiography and public life

Submission Deadline: 20 October 2026
Notification of Acceptance: 10 November 2026

✉️ Please send your proposal as a single PDF file, including your name, affiliation, presentation title, abstract (300–500 words), and a short CV (1–2 pages) to [email protected], with “[Paths Not Taken]” in the subject line.

🔎 Read the full CfP here: https://mwsgeorgia.hypotheses.org/13941