Ninutsa Nadirashvili

Ninutsa Nadirashvili is a Georgian-American gender studies scholar, editor, and translator. She earned her bachelor’s degree in International Studies at Boston College and completed a dual master’s program in Gender Studies at the Universities of Utrecht and York. Since 2020, Ninutsa has been actively involved in NGO initiatives based in Georgia, collaborating with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Women’s Fund in Georgia, and the Equality Movement. In 2019, she spent a year working as an English teaching assistant through a program facilitated by Fulbright Austria. In 2022, she completed a Fulbright research fellowship in Tbilisi, focusing on an intersectional analysis of Georgian literature and language textbooks. Currently, she is a doctoral student at the Centre for Global Learning at Coventry University in the U.K., exploring how transnationalism has shaped Women’s and Gender Studies programs across Europe. Her research involves interdisciplinary feminist methods and methodologies, including autoethnography, curricula case studies, textual analysis, interviews, and focus groups.

I am a first-generation Georgian-American. This background has informed my undergraduate and graduate work in comparative literature and film analysis, which I paired with theories on postcolonialism, nationalism, social reproduction, and representations of humanness. I intend to maintain this perspective as I conduct my PhD studies at the Centre for Global Learning.

My research interests include feminist storytelling, contemporary cultural theory, relationalities, postcolonial and decolonial theories, migration and nationalism, film studies, poetics, queer theory, and critical pedagogies.

My PhD project is part of EUTERPE (European Literatures and Gender in Transnational Perspective, funded by the European Union). EUTERPE is focused on the contribution of gendered and transnational perspectives within an interdisciplinary approach to literature and cultural studies. My research relates to a specific EUTERPE strand concerned with transnational literatures' role within the European academe.

Drawing on interdisciplinary feminist methods and methodologies, including autoethnography pedagogical and textual content analyses, curricula case studies, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with educators, students and transnational intellectuals in cross-European contexts, this research investigates the ways in which transnational literatures have influenced Women’s and Gender Studies. The research asks to what extent transnational intellectuals and literatures that challenge thinking about European gender identities have been deployed to develop, extend, and shift theoretical frameworks for rethinking politics of identity within interdisciplinary gender studies.

My Master's project is titled "Go Ahead: Georgian Cinema, Carriance, and the Turn/Overturn" and it intertwines the theoretical works of Bracha L. Ettinger and Sylvia Wynter with close visual and narrative readings of Georgian films, illuminating how relationality in the family, community, and nation logic, can be transformed. It examines how we can modify the current praxis of existing with each other through feminist storytelling and art, to find inspiration as the world ends and carrying with care becomes essential to our new ways of being.