Elene Kekelia

Elene Kekelia received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She is currently affiliated with George Washington University, where she most recently served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her work engages with comparative-historical sociology, memory studies, and the sociology of exile. In her research, she focuses on and contributes to the understanding of inter-war exiles as a comparative historical sociologist. For her dissertation, she compared the Georgian, Ukrainian, and Azerbaijani exiled communities that fled the Soviet occupation around the 1920s. Previously, Elene has worked on the Soviet sites of memory (including the conflicted memory around Stalin, Pantheons, and Soviet art), as well as on the memory of Georgian internally displaced persons. Elene also received a Ph.D. in 2019 from Ilia State University in cultural studies after defending her dissertation titled "The 20th-century monuments and national narratives in Georgia."