Curriculum Vitae

Professor of Anthropology
Trent University
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Education

2001        Ph.D.   University of Chicago (Linguistics) 

1992        M.A.    University of Chicago (Linguistics)

1987        B.A.    Reed College (Classics/Religion)

Professional Experience 

2016-              Professor, Department of Anthropology, Trent University

2007-2015     Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Trent University

2003-2006    Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Trent University

2002-2003    Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago

2000-2001    Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Bard College

1998-2000    Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Reed College

Books

2015    Love Stories: Language, Private Love, and Public Romance in Georgia. University of Toronto Press.

2012a    Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. Brighton: Academic Studies Press. Now open access:  https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zxsjjc, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/30900?show=full

2012b    The Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. London: Continuum Press.

2002    (Co-authored with Marcello Cherchi.) Disciplines and Nations: Niko Marr vs. his Georgian Students on Tbilisi State University and the ‘Japhetidology’/ ‘Caucasology’ Schism. The Carl Beck Papers: The Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

Edited volumes

2008    Guest editor. Talk. Language and Communication 28.2.  

2004    (With Adi Hastings.) Guest editor. Acts of Alterity. Language & Communication 24.4.

2003    Guest editor. Words and Beyond: Linguistic and Semiotic Studies of the Sociocultural Order. Language and Communication 23.3-4.

Journal articles

Submitted    Metro Girl: The alliance of art and architecture in the Visual Aesthetics of the Modern Georgian City of the 1960s. 

Forthcoming    Flânerie in Text and City: The Heterogeneous Urban Publics of The Georgian Feuilleton. Forthcoming in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

2021    Spectral aphasia, psychical ghost stories, and spirit post-offices: Three modern ghost stories about communication infrastructures. Signs and Society 9.2, 204-233. 

2020a    Free the code, free the world: The chronotopic “worldness” of the virtual world of Ryzom. Language & Communication 70, 119-131.

2020b    Goblin spiders, ghosts of flowers and butterfly fantasies: Lafcadio Hearn’s transnational, transmedia and trans-species aesthetics of the weird. Japan Forum 32.2, 259-283.

2019    The doe-eyed girl: the face of Post-Stalinist Georgian urban modernism. Semiotic Review, special issue on Faces. https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/51/82

2018a    Spiritualist signal and Theosophical noise. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28(1): 67-92. 

2018b     Animating virtual worlds: emergence and ecological animation of Ryzom’s living world of Atys. First Monday 23(4), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/8127/7414

2017a    No ruins. No ghosts. Preternature 61.1: 63-92.

2016a        Peircean steamiotics: technological metaphors and pastoral designs
Semiotic Review. No. 4 Im/Materialities. https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/13

2016b    Monstrous media and media monsters. Contemporary Legend 3.5, 112-123.

2014a    Domestication of the wild supra. Ab Imperio 4, 53-62.

2014b    Once upon a time there was sex in Georgia. Slavic Review 73.2, 265-286

2013a    (With Ilana Gershon) Animating interaction. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 107–37, https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau3.3.006

2013b    Altaholics Anonymous: on the pathological proliferation of parasites in  massively multiple online worlds. Semiotic Review 1: Parasites. https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/30

2010a    The semiotics of brand. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 33–49.

2010b    Теория Периферийного кафе: Воды Лагидзе и периферийная городская модерность.  Антропологический форум 12, 272-296.

2009a    The epoch of Magna: capitalist brands and postsocialist revolutions in Georgia. Slavic Review 68 (4), 924-45.

2009b    Just like England: on the liberal institutions of the Circassians. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (3), 590–618.

2008a    Materiality and cosmology: old Georgian churches as sacred, sublime, and secular objects. Ethnos 73 (3), 327-360.

2008b    (With Anne Meneley). Material objects in cosmological worlds: an introduction. Ethnos 73 (3), 285-302.

2008c    Barista rants about stupid customers at Starbucks: what imaginary conversations can teach us about real ones. Language & Communication 28 (2), 101-126.

2008d    От человеческих конфликтов к цивилизационным. Антропологический форум 8, 59-70.

2007a    Rose-colored glasses? Color revolutions and cartoon chaos in postsocialist Georgia. Cultural Anthropology 22 (2), 171-213.

2007b    (With Ann Uplisashvili) “Our Beer”: ethnographic brands in postsocialist Georgia. American Anthropologist 109 (4), 626-641.

2007c    A construction-based view of possessive and local case-marking in Middle and Modern Welsh relative clauses. Journal of Celtic Linguistics 11, 77-130.

2006    Words and things, goods and services: problems of translation between language and political economy. Language & Communication 26 (3-4), 270-284.

2005a    Staging the state and the hypostasization of violence in the medieval Cornish Drama. Cornish Studies 13, 126-169.

2005b    Jewish ghosts, Knackers, Tommyknockers, and other sprites of capitalism in the Cornish mines. Cornish Studies 13, 216-255.

2004a    Owning and belonging: a semiotic investigation of the affective categories of a bourgeois society. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2), 300-325.

2004b    The streets of Bethesda: the slate quarrier and the Welsh language in the Welsh liberal imagination. Language and Society 33 (4), 469-500.

2004c    Describing dialect and defining civilization in an early Georgian nationalist manifesto: Ilia Ch’avch’avadze’s ‘Letters of a Traveler’. Russian Review 63 (1), 26-47.

2004d    The geology of railway embankments: celticity, liberalism, the Oxford Welsh reforms, and the word order(s) of Welsh. Language and Communication 24 (2), 135-163  

2004e    (with Adi Hastings). Introduction: acts of alterity. Language & Communication 24 (4), 291-311.

2003    The Word made land: incarnationalism and the spatial poetics and pragmatics of largesse in medieval Cornish drama. Semiotica 146 (1/4), 237-266.

2002a    Welsh rocks and English money: ideologies of divisions of language and divisions of labor in Nineteenth century Welsh slate quarries. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44 (3),481-510.

2002b    Orderly affect: The syntactic coding of pragmatics in Welsh expressive constructions. Pragmatics 12, 415-446.

2001a    On social deixis. Anthropological Linguistics 43 (3), 55-100.

2001b    The craft of reference: the Welsh language and the division of labor in Nineteenth Century slate quarries. Language and Communication 21 (3), 209-233.

1997    Indexical operators and scope relations in the Old Georgian relative clause. Linguistics 35, 513-563.

1995    Fluid intransitivity in Middle Welsh: Gradience, typology and 'unaccusativity'. Lingua 97, 171-194.

Open Access Online Publications 

2019    Tiflis-Tbilisi.com.  Website devoted to making available research materials and research articles related to the grant SSHRC grant Reassembling the City: Tbilisi from Safavid Persia to Postsocialism (239,318 over five years)

Book Chapters

In Preparation    Ritual Drinks: Performative and Phatic. For The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language. David Tavárez, editor

Under Review    Can Such Things Be? Ambrose Bierce and Newspaper Folklore. Paper under review for inclusion in a volume on the folkloresque edited by Michael Foster and Jeffrey Tolbert.

Forthcoming     How to domesticate a Georgian goblin. Paper submitted for a volume entitled How to Live with Monsters edited by Yasmine Musharbash and Ilana Gershon. 

Forthcoming     Niko Marr and his Georgian students on the project of a university in Tbilisi: a temple of Georgian science or a university for the Caucasus? Forthcoming [in Georgian] in საქართველოს დემოკრატიული რესპუბლიკა: ფორმისა და შინაარსის ძიებაში [Georgia’s democratic republic: in search of form and content]. 

2021    (with Tamta Khalvashi) Human devils: Affects and spectres of alterity in eerie Cities of Georgia. In Modern Folk Devils: Contemporary Constructions of Evil, edited by M. D. Frederiksen and I. Harboe Knudsen, 63–79. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.

2019    Botanizing on the asphalt: the “poké-flaneur” and the virtual urban wildlife of Pokémon GO.  Neriko Doerr and Debra Occhi (eds.), The Augmented Reality of Pokémon GO, pp. 65-93. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 

2018    Monstrous media and media monsters: from Cottingley to Waukesha.  In Trevor Blank and Lynne McNeill (eds.), Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypastas and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, pp. 155-181. Louisville, CO: University of Colorado/Utah State University Press.

2017    The semiotic ecology of drinks and talk in Georgia. In Jillian Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar (eds.), Language and Materiality, pp.226-247. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

2016    Pixie's progress: How the pixies became part of the 19th century fairy mythology. In Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey Tolbert (eds.), The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in Popular Culture, 81-103. Boulder, Colorado: University of Colorado Press.

2014a    When goblins come to town: the ethnography of urban hauntings in Georgia. In Yasmine Musharbash, Geir Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 161-177. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2014b    (With Ilana Gershon) Language and media. In N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman and Jack Sidnell(eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, 557-576. Cambridge. 

2013a    (with Adam Walker) Georgian wine: the transformation of socialist quantity into post-socialist quality. In Rachel Black and Robert Ulin (eds.), Wine and Culture: from Vineyard to Glass, 201-219. London: Bloomsbury.

2013b    The theory of the Café Central and the practice of the Café Peripheral: aspirational and abject infrastructures of sociability on the European periphery.  In Aksel Tjora and Graham Scrambler (eds.), Cafe Society, 43-65. New York: Palgrave McMillan.

2011a     (with Zaza Shatirishvili). Why are the dolls laughing? Tbilisi culture between intelligentsia culture and socialist labor.  In Tsypylma Darieva et al. (eds.), Urban Spaces after Socialism: Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities, 207-225.  Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

2011b    (with Zaza Shatirishvili). The exoticism and eroticism of the city: The ‘kinto’ and his city.  In Tsypylma Darieva et al. (eds.), Urban Spaces after Socialism: Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities, 261-281. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

2010    Folklore and terror in Georgia’s “notorious” Pankisi Gorge: the ethnography of state violence at the margins of the nation. In Nino Tsitsishvili and Sergei Arutiunov (ed.), Cultural Archetypes and Political Change in the Caucasus, 234-256. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing. 

2009a    The city of balconies: elite politics and the changing semiotics of the post-socialist cityscape. In K. Van Assche, J. Salukvadze, N. Shavishvili (eds.), City Culture and City Planning in Tbilisi. Where Europe and Asia Meet, 71-102. Lewiston: Mellen Press. 

2009b    The hotel/refugee camp Iveria: symptom, monster, fetish, home. In K. Van Assche, J. Salukvadze, N. Shavishvili (eds.), City Culture and City Planning in Tbilisi. Where Europe and Asia Meet, 319-349. Lewiston: Mellen Press. 

2007a    Love Khevsur style: the romance of the mountains and mountaineer romance in Georgian ethnography. In Bruce Grant and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann (eds.), Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area, 23-46. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Berlin: LIT Verlag.

2007b    “Magnas” epoka: brandis t’ot’emizmi da ts’armosaxviti gadasvla sotsializmidan post’-sotsializmze sakartveloshi. In Sajaro Lektsiebi Erovnul Bibliot’ek’ashi, 2007.

2003a    'The rock does not understand English': Welsh and the division of labor in Nineteenth-century Gwynedd slate quarries. In Brian D. Joseph et al. (eds.), When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Language Competition, and Language Coexistence, 45-75. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

2003b    Editorial Foreword. Words and Beyond. In Words and Beyond: Linguistic and Semiotic Studies of the Sociocultural Order. Language and Communication Volume 23, 3-4 (July/October 2003).

Comments and Review Essays

2018    Comment on Sasha Newell, “The Affectiveness of Symbols.” Current Anthropology 59.1, 14-17.

2016    Comment on Eitan Wilf, “The Post-it Note Economy: Understanding post-Fordist business innovation through one of its key semiotic technologies.” Current Anthropology 57.6: 751-3.

2009    Can the avatar speak? (Review article). Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19 (2), 310-325.

Book reviews    

2020    Review of Martin Demant Fredriksen (2018), An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 29.2: 128-130.

2018    Review of Tsypylma Darieva, Florian Mühlfried, Kevin Tuite 2018 Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus. Reading Religion. http://readingreligion.org/books/sacred-places-emerging-spaces

2017     When the Guest becomes the Host: Review of [Erik Scott, 2016] Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of the Soviet Empire. Review Essay. Diaspora 19:2/3 (2010), 351-360.

2015     Review of Jessica Greenberg, 2014, After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia. Slavic Review, 74(3), 597-600.

2007    Review of Richard Bauman, 2004, A World of Other’s Words. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 17, No. 2: 301–303.

1998    Review of Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, 1995, Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anthropological Linguistics 40 (2), 357-61.

1996    Review of R. D. Borsley and I. Roberts (eds.), 1996, The Syntax of the Celtic Languages: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Anthropological Linguistics 38 (4), 732-4.

Newspaper articles

2012    (with Ilana Gershon) “Publishing in an Internet World.” Anthropology News 53(3) March 2012.

2007    “Magnas” epoka: brandis t’ot’emizmi da ts’armosaxviti gadasvla sotsializmidan post’-sotsializmze sakartveloshi. Axali Shvidi Dghe 20-26 July 2007, 13-15

Other Open Access Online publications

2007    Socialist supras and drinking democratically: changing images of the Georgian feast and Georgian society from socialism to post-socialism. (http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/cours/Manning-Supra.pdf)

            The epoch of Magna: brand totemism and the imagined transition/translation from socialism to post-socialism in Georgia.
(http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/caucasus/Manning-SCApaper.pdf)

            Aluda is even better than Luda: Selling Beer ‘traditionally’ in post-socialist Georgia. (http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/caucasus/Manning_BeerTalk.pdf)

 2006    Talk and techne: images of conversation and the Starbucks service encounter. (http://www.semioticon.com/virtuals/semiotics/talk.pdf)

Papers in conference proceedings

2002    Describing dialect and defining civilization in Ilia Chavchavadze’s mgzavris tserilebi. amirani/Amirani 7, 97-124. Tbilisi/Montreal: ICRI.

1998    Indexical categories in the Old Georgian relative clause: ese, ege, igi. NSL 9: Linguistic Studies on the Non-Slavic Languages of the C.I.S. and the Baltic Republics. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society

1997    The geology of railway embankments: Oxford Welsh and the 'abnormal sentence'. CLS 33, Papers from the Panels on Linguistic Ideologies in Contact, 59-74. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

1996a    What Welsh relatives are really like. CLS 32: The Main Session, 251-265. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

1996b    Mi and mo revisited: the development of the category of 'orientation' in Old Georgian. NSL 8: Linguistic Studies on the Non-Slavic Languages of the C.I.S. and the Baltic Republics, 249-68. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

1995a    'Social' deixis and social change in North Wales. Salsa II. Texas Linguistic Forum 34, 244-54.

1995b    Quotative clitic 'spreading' in NE Georgian mountain dialects. CLS 31: Papers from the Thirty-first Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Volume 2: The Parasession on Clitics, 198-214. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

1994    Split locativity in Old Georgian and Svan. NSL 7: Linguistic Studies in the Non-Slavic Languages of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic Republics, 211-240. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 

Grants, Honors and Awards

2021    Principal Investigator, SSHRC Insight grant Gardens Elsewhere and Otherwise: A historical and Ethnographic Study of Georgia’s Green Heterotopias (152,065 over 5 years)

2020    Merit award for scholarship, Trent University.

2015    Principal Investigator, SSHRC grant Reassembling the City: Tbilisi from Safavid Persia to Postsocialism (239,318 over five years)

2013    Edward Sapir Book Prize for Semiotics of Drink and Drinking

2012    Merit award for scholarship, Trent University.

2010    Merit award for scholarship, Trent University.

2009-2012    Principal Investigator, SSHRC grant, Displaced Persons and State Formation after the Russo-Georgian War.

2008    Merit award for scholarship, Trent University.

2008    NCEEER travel grant.

2006    NCEEER travel grant.

2005     NCEEER travel grant.

2005    SSHRC internal grant, Trent University.

2004    Merit award for scholarship, Trent University.

2003-4    Participant, European-American Young Scholars’ Summer Institute, on The Concept of Language in the Academic Disciplines.  Held at the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina (2003) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2004).

2004    SSHRC internal grant, Trent University.

2002     Participant, SSRC workshop ‘Globalizing the Caucasus and Central Asia.’ Berkeley, April 19-22, 2002.

2002-3    NCEEER Research contract for grant entitled Constructing kartveloba: the metasemiotics of national imaginings (2 years, Republic of Georgia)

2001-2002    NEH Collaborative Humanities Research Fellowship for grant entitled Constructing kartveloba: the metasemiotics of national imaginings (6 months, Republic of Georgia)

1999        Summer Research Grant, Reed College

1998-1999    Stillman Drake Fund for Faculty Development, Reed College

1996-1997    Whiting Dissertation Fellowship

1994-1998    Jacob J. Javits Graduate Fellowship

1989-1992    National Science Foundation Fellowship

1989        A-level certification in Welsh

1987-1988    Thomas J. Watson Fellowship 

1987        Phi Beta Kappa, Reed College

Invited Lectures

2021    (With Ketevan Gurchiani) Gardens otherwise and elsewhere: A historical and ethnographic study of Georgian gardens. Online Colloquium at the Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt.

2020    An Accidental Ethnographer. Online lecture, Department of Anthropology, Ilia University, Tbilisi.

2019    Goblin Spiders, Ghosts of Flowers and Butterfly Fantasies: Lafcadio Hearn's Transnational and Transmedia Aesthetics of the Weird. Invited talked sponsored by the Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Professorship in Japanese Studies & the Smurfit-Stone Corporation Endowed Professorship in Irish Studies. University of Missouri-St. Louis.

2018    Guest lecture via Skype on my book Love Stories Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder.

            The City of Gardens: Three Garden Heterotopias of Old Tbilisi. Public Lecture Presented at Ilia Chavchavadze University in Tbilisi.

            Niko Marr and his Georgian Students on the Project of a University in Tbilisi: A Temple of Georgian Science or a University for the Caucasus? Invited paper given [English and Georgian] at Ilia Chavchavadze University conference in October: საქართველოს დემოკრატიული რესპუბლიკა ‎‎(1918-1921) როგორც პროექტი. პოლიტიკური, კულტურული და ეკონომიკური ასპექტები. 

2017    Animating Virtual Worlds.  Invited Lecture, University of Texas, Department of Anthropology, Austin.  

           Urban Haunters: Ghosts and Kajis. Invited Lecture, Department of Anthropology, Tbilisi Free University, Tbilisi.

           Brand Animism and Brand Animation.  Keynote Address.  Semiofest, Toronto 2017.

           Animating Virtual Worlds. Invited Lecture, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto

2016    Ghosts, Goblins and Fairies: Lafcadio Hearn’s Monstrous Media. Invited Talk at University of Copenhagen, Department of Anthropology.

2014    Animating the city: Safavid soundscapes in socialist Tbilisi. Invited talk given to the Center for Media, Culture and History and the Department of Anthropology, NYU.    

2013    Playing characters and animating alts in Ryzom. Agencies of Things conference hosted by Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.

2012    The semiotic ecology of drink. Paper delivered at Southeast European center for Semiotic Studies, Sozopol, Bulgaria.

2011-2012    Fairies on the Frontier: Sprites of Capitalist and Colonial Nature in the American West and Australia. Hilliard Foundation Invited Speaker, Anthropology Department, University of Nevada, Reno (October 2011). Paper also presented at the Toronto Semiotics Circle, January 2012.

2010-2011    The Soviet Uncola. Invited paper presented at the Anthropology Department, University of Pennsylvania (December 2010); CREES and Anthropology of Europe Workshop, University of Chicago (May 2011), Anthropology Colloquium, Stanford University (May 2011).

2009    The Hotel/Refugee Camp Iveria: Symptom, Monster, Fetish, Home. Paper presented at the Semiotics Workshop at the University of Chicago.

2007    “Magnas” epoka: brandis t’ot’emizmi da ts’armosaxviti gadasvla sotsializmidan post’-sotsializmze sakartveloshi. (The Epoch of Magna: Brand totemism and the imagined transition/translation from socialism to post-socialism in Georgia.) Public Lecture, National Parliamentary Library of Georgia, July 6 2007. 

             Aluda is even better than Luda: Selling Beer ‘traditionally’ in post-socialist Georgia. Talk presented at Anthropology Department, Universite de Montreal, January 25 2007. 

            “Our Beer”: Ethnographic branding in contemporary Georgia. Invited talk delivered at the Chicago Caucasus Conference, May 16 2007.

2006    Ballad of the Khevsurs: The intelligentsia romance with the Georgian mountains. Workshop in social Anthropology: “Caucasus paradigms”. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. 

            Imaginary conversations. Toronto Semiotics Circle.

2005    The Rose Revolution. Department of Anthropology and the Center for Russian and East European Studies. University of Michigan.

2004    The Rose Revolution. Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto.

            Dictators of the table and drinking democratically: changing images of the Georgian feast and Georgian society from Socialism to Post-socialism. Department of Anthropology, University of Maynooth, Ireland.

            Sprites of Capitalism: Jewish ghosts and other fairies in the Cornish mines.  

            Department of Anthropology, University of Maynooth, Ireland.

2003    Dictators of the table and drinking democratically: changing images of the Georgian feast and Georgian society from Socialism to Post-socialism. Department of Anthropology, Trent University.

2001    ‘You must get a Welshman to break the rock, for the rock does not understand English.’ Department of Anthropology, Yale University.

1999    'Dearest Old Welsh, if ever it dies, from the mouth of a quarrier, I believe, will come the final word.’ Bard College.

1997    The moral and political economy of 'belonging': Social deixis and social change in North Wales. Reed College.

Paper presentations and panels organized

2021a    The Gardens of Tbilisi. Workshop: From Armenian Pomegranates to Urban Gardening: Research perspectives on Gardening, Horticulture and Plants from Transcaucasia and Beyond. Frobenius Institute Webinar. 

2021b    Tbilisi was Once Green: Ecological Narratives of a Changing Cityscape. ASEEES virtual convention part of the panel Material Memories, December 3.

2021c    Plant Publics: Dialogs of Gardens and Genres. 

2020    The Languages of Nowhere: Language Creation, Roleplaying, and Virtual “Worldness.” Talk delivered at Con/Lang, Alt/Lang, Art/Lang Webinar (October/November 2020).

2019a    Could commodities themselves speak, they would say… paper given at the AES conference in St. Louis.

2019b    The Medium, The Message and the “Message Medium.” Paper given at the SAR Conference in Toronto.

2019c    Partners in Desire: Consumers and Commodities. Panel co-organized with Laura Milller at AES conference in St. Louis.

2019d    Animating Transit Infrastructures: the “Superflat” Ontology of the Kyoto Moe Moe Project. AAA Vancouver. 

2019e    Through the Looking Glass: Screens, Worlds, Interfaces. Invited commentary, AAA Vancouver.

2018a    Niko Marr and his Georgian students on the project of a University in Tbilisi: A Temple of Georgian Science or a University for the Caucasus?  Ilia Chavchavadze University conference Conference Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-1921): In Search of Form and Content.

2018b    Worldness. Paper presented at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology conference. University of Pennsylvania.

2017a    Discussant: Interstices of Pokemon GO and Pokemon NO: Intersecting Chronotopes and Moral Panic of Augmented Reality. AAS Toronto. 

2017b    The Girl with Downcast Eyes: The Visual Semiotics of the 1960s Georgian Modernist City. IVMC5 (Intervnational Visual Methods Conference), Singapore. 

2017c    Art and Architecture in 1960s Tbilisi. WIP talks CRRC Georgia, Tbilisi.

2016    A Traditional Face in the Modern Crowd: The Secular Feminine Icons of Georgian Socialist Modernism. AAA Minneapolis.

2015a    Spiritualist signal and Theosophical noise. AAA Denver.

2015b    Animating the city: Safavid soundscapes in socialist Tbilisi, WIP talks, CRRC Georgia, Tbilisi

2015c    Lafcadio Hearn's cosmopolitan and interdimensional fairyland: The exchange of people and spirits between Japan and Europe. Association for Asian Studies AAS-in-Asia conference Taipei, Taiwan.

2014a    Animating animality and the virtual 'living world'. AAA Washington DC, December 2014.

2014b        Animating animality and ontologies of violence in the virtual 'living world'. Popular Culture and World Politics 7.0, Ottawa.    

2013    Peirce's steam-engines: technological metaphors, pastoral design, and Peircean semiotics. AAA Chicago.

2012        No ruins, no ghosts. AAA San Francisco.

2011    Altaholics Anonymous: on the proliferation of parasitic identities. AAA Montreal.

2010a    The Theory of the Café Central and the Practice of the Café Peripheral: Problematic Publics on the Periphery. AAA New Orleans.

2010b    The Theory of the Café Central and the Practice of the Café Peripheral: Problematic Publics on the Periphery. Harriman Institute, Columbia University. 

2009a    BonAqua and Borjomi: Capitalist and Socialist bottled waters and the Branding of Technology and Nature in Georgia. Consumer Culture Theory conference, Ann Arbor.

2009b    BonAqua and Borjomi: Capitalist and Socialist Bottled Waters and the Branding of Technology and Nature. AAA, Philadelphia, November 2009.

2008a    Your girlfriend is your ‘sworn brother’: public idioms for  intimate relationships in mountain Georgia. AAA San Francisco.

2008b    Georgians, that is, Readers of Droeba.  University of Michigan conference “Georgia: the Making of a National Culture”, Ann Arbor, MI.

2007a    Folklore and Terror in Georgia’s ‘Notorious’ Pankisi Gorge. AES/CASCA, Toronto.

2007b    Sprites of Capitalism? Jewish ghost-fairies and other fairy ‘hybrids’ in British folkloric science. AAA, Washington DC. 

2006a    Idolaters without images and images of idolatry: Orthodox and Intelligentsia discourses about the Georgian ‘pagan’ mountain peoples. AAA San Jose.

2006b    (with Rupert Stasch). Panel organizer for panel: Idols of the marketplace: commodity circulation and moral imagination. Society for Cultural Anthropology (AAA/SCA), Milwaukee.  

2006b    The Epoch of Magna: Brand Totemism and the Imagined Transition/Translation from Socialism to Post-Socialism in Georgia. Society for Cultural Anthropology (AAA/SCA), Milwaukee.  

2005a    Tarragon pop: Ethnographic brand in the post-socialist economy of Georgia. AAA, Washington, DC.

2005b    Ecclesioclasm. Paper presented at the Anthropology of Religion section of the AAA in Vancouver.

2004    Words and things: goods and services. Paper presented at the University of Chicago conference Critical Theory in the 21st Century: Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination After 10 Years. Chicago, Illinois.

2003a        Renters and Real Tbilisians: Historicizing the Georgian city as an ethnolinguistic category. AAA Chicago.

2003b    supra da saxelmtsipo sabchota qopashii (satirul-iumoristuli zhurnal 'niangis' (1933-1990) masalebis mixedvit)/The Supra and the State: images of the Georgian feast from the Soviet humor magazine ‘Niangi’ (1933-1990).  10th annual Kutaisi Discussions, Kutaisi, Georgia.

2003c    Reflections on the ‘Meetings’: the metapragmatics of ‘democratic’ oratory in post-socialist Georgia. Anthropology of Europe workshop, University of Chicago.

2002a    Reflections on the ‘Meetings’: the metapragmatics of ‘democratic’ oratory in post-socialist Georgia. AAA, New Orleans.

2002b    On Circassian liberalism. The Social Theory Workshop, University of Chicago.

2001a    Voicing the Terek river’s roar: the rhetoric of Georgian dialect in Georgian critiques of colonialism. AAA Washington DC.

2001b    Welsh rocks and English money: ideologies of divisions of language and divisions of labor in Nineteenth century Welsh slate quarries. The Social Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago.

2000a    The rock does not understand English: The slate quarrier and the Welsh language. AAA San Francisco.

2000b    Peasant in form, gentry in content: The representation of Mokhevian dialect in Ilia Chavchavadze’s Mgzavris C’erilebi.Michigan-Chicago Graduate Student Conference in Linguistic Anthropology. University of Chicago.

1999    The social poetics of Ilia Chavchavadze’s Mgzavris C’erilebi  [‘Letters of a Traveler’] and the invention of Georgian dialect. Conference on the Cultures of Caucasia. University of Chicago.

1998    'The rock does not understand English': Welsh in the linguistic division of labor in Nineteenth-century Gwynedd slate quarries. When Languages Collide: Sociocultural and Geopolitical Implications of Language Conflict and Coexistence. Ohio State University.

1997a    The geology of railway embankments: Oxford Welsh and the 'abnormal sentence'. Parasession on Language Ideology and Contact at the Thirty-third Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. University of Chicago.

1997b    (with Marcello Cherchi). Niko Marr and his Georgian students: On Tbilisi State University and the 'Japhetidology'/'Caucasology' schism. The Eighth International Conference on the Cultures of Caucasia. University of Chicago.

1996a    What Welsh relatives are really like. Thirty-second Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. University of Chicago.

1996b    Hypostasis, explanation, and the Old Georgian local case system. Paper presented at the conference on Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistic Theory. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

1995a    Quotative clitic 'spreading' in NE Georgian Mountain dialects. Thirty-first Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Parasession on Clitics. University of Chicago.

1995b    Indexical categories in the Old Georgian relative clause: ese, ege, igi.  
Paper presented at NSL 9: Linguistic Studies on the Non-Slavic Languages of the C.I.S. and the Baltic Republics. University of Chicago.

1994a    'Social deixis' and social change in North Wales. Second Annual Symposium about Language and Society at Austin, April 1994. University of Texas at Austin.

1994b    Cultural categories of space and membership in nominal and verbal deixis. Time, Space and Identity: The First International Colloquium on Deixis. University of Kentucky at Lexington. 

1993    Mi  and mo  revisited: Global indexical coding and the category of 'orientation' in Old Georgian. NSL 8: Linguistic Studies on the Non-Slavic Languages of the C.I.S. and the Baltic Republics. University of Chicago.

1991    'Split locativity' in Old Georgian and Svan. NSL 7: Linguistic Studies on the Non-Slavic Languages of the C.I.S. and the Baltic Republics. University of Chicago.

1990    Syntactic borrowing and its consequences: Spanish-style preposition deletion in Patagonian Welsh. Nineteenth Annual Linguistics Symposium at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee.

Courses designed and/or taught

Introduction to Linguistics               Culture, Colonialism and Imperial Peripheries
Introduction to Anthropology         Linguistic Typology
Introduction to the Humanities      Traditional Oratory and Poetics
Intermediate Georgian                      Semiotic Anthropology
Anthropology of Language              Language Encounter and Language Shift
Language, Culture and Society       Ethnography and Literature in the Caucasus
Anthropology of Europe                   Nationalism
Monsters                                              Anthropology of Colonialism
Anthropology of Technology           Style and Subculture
Freaks and Geeks                               Virtual Worlds
Anthropology of Media                     Animacy, Animism, Animation     
Language and Media: Voice             Anthropology of Drinks and Drinking
Contemporary Legends                    Language and Media: Writing Systems

Professional Service

Editor, Semiotic Review (2012-present) 

Book series editor (with Sabina Perino and Jim Wilce). Bloomsbury Studies in Linguistic Anthropology (2016-present)

Editor (with Miyako Inoue), Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2007-2010)

Member of the International Advisory Board for the PhD program in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ilia State University, Tbilisi (2020-)

Manuscript, article, fellowship and/or grant reviewer (often on multiple occasions) for American Academy in Berlin, American Anthropologist, American Councils for International Education, American Ethnologist, Anthropologica, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropological Theory, Anthropologie et Sociétés, Berg Hahn Press, Broadview Press, Bloomsbury,  Comparative Studies in Society and History, Consumption Markets &  Culture, Cornell University Press, Critique of Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Ethnos, Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa, Euroasiatica, European Planning Studies, European Science Foundation, Food, Culture and Society, I Quaderni di Urbanistica Tre, International Journal of American Linguistics, Interventions, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Journal of Sociolinguistics, Kadmos, Language & Communication, Language in Society, Marine Policy, MWK fellows, Nationalities Papers, NCEEER, New Media and Society, NU SHSS, Oxford University Press, Palgrave McMillan Press, REGION, Reviews in Anthropology,  Russian Review, Rustaveli Foundation, Signs and Society, SSHRC, Slavic Review, Syracuse University Press, Taylor and Francis, Temple University Press, University of California Press, University of Minnesota Press, University of Toronto Press, Utah State University Press.  

Tenure file and promotion reviewer for University of Regina, University of Michigan, University of California Santa Cruz, New York University, City University of New York, London School of Economics, University of Notre Dame, Rutgers University, St. Mary’s University.

Languages

Oral and Literary proficiency: Welsh (A-levels), Georgian (teaching experience), Spanish 

Literary Proficiency: Latin, Middle Welsh, Middle Cornish, French, Classical Greek  

Fieldwork experience

2001-Present    Field and archival work in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia
1999                    Library and archival work in Bangor district, North Wales 
1992-3                Fieldwork in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia  
1991                    Fieldwork in Bangor District, North Wales  
1988                    Fieldwork in Trelew district, Patagonia, Argentina  
1987-8                Fieldwork in Bangor District, North Wales
1985                    Language training in Bangor District, North Wales