Ana Lolua




In the context of the groundbreaking reform agenda of Perestroika and Glasnost in the second half of 1980’s in the Soviet Union, historians from our region had to confront with the simultaneity of subjective memory of victims and objective history reserved for professionals. With this came the imperative of critically assessing the difficult past: civil society organizations, religious and private individuals started looking for the meaning and adequate form to transform and reshape previous sites of memory and mark new spaces, buildings, monuments, exhibitions on the complex topography of terror. Central and local communist elites need to react to such changes at the grassroots level to keep control of the process of mobilizing collective historical experience into a common myth in the service of a new state.
The ongoing research looks at four different state museums,-two in Georgia and two in Ukraine,- Georgian National Museum, Stalin Museum of Gori, the National Museum “Holodomor victims Memorial” and Kharkiv Historical Museum to analyze the symbolic language and form of visual representation of contemporary history and its transformation since Perestroika period until today. I am particularly interested in how the process of late 80’s and post independence patriotization of history translates itself in the museum space, as well as actors behind and question of their agency (Eigensinn). Through written, visual and oral sources: museum council records, exhibition plans and catalogues, oral history interviews with the museum staff I examine to what extent the museums addressed in the study kept Soviet time practices of everyday as well as strategies of positioning themselves vis-à-vis national and international audiences since the late socialism until today.

Research Interests:

  • Cultural history & memory during late socialist times in Georgia and Ukraine
  • Late Soviet and post-Soviet Museums and memorials
  • Georgian dissidents and history of National Movement


Vita:

04/2018 - Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt International Doctoral Program
at Georg-August University Göttingen and Ilia State University, Department of History, PhD Student


09/2017 – 06/2018 – Central European University, Master of Arts in Nationalism Studies (program to be completed with the thesis defense in September 2019)


09/2010 - 11/2011 - College of Europe, Natolin Campus, Master of Arts in the European Interdisciplinary Studies


09/2005 - 07/2010 – Tbilisi State University, Bachelors degree in International Relations, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences



07/2018 – Research Kolloquium by Professor Dr. Anke Hilbrenner (Department of Eastern European History, Georg-August University Göttingen)


04/2016 – Young Researchers’ Seminar, Developing European Studies in the Caucasus (University of Graz)


02/2013 – micro-study on a poster by JumpStart Georgia: “Georgians your national hero is a mass murderer” (Ilia State University)