Tamta Khalvashi (PhD, University of Copenhagen) is Professor of Anthropology and founding director of the PhD Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University in Tbilisi and currently a JESH Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research explores affect, materiality, and awkward forms of belonging in postimperial worlds, with a particular focus on Georgia and the Black Sea. Her current research examines the multispecies afterlives of Soviet mass housing, tracing how buildings, humans, plants, animals, and infrastructures become entangled through decay, maintenance, and repair. Working across ethnographic writing, archives, photography, sound, and film, she develops multimodal approaches to studying precarious and transforming worlds. She is editor of A Sea of Transience: Poetics, Politics and Aesthetics along the Black Sea Coast (Berghahn, 2023), and her work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, History and Anthropology, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and other venues.