Gvantsa's Background

I grew up in Georgia, a country shaped by the legacies of Soviet collapse, shifting borders, and recurring wars. When I was a teenager, the 2008 Russo-Georgian War disrupted the lives of many around me, as people I loved were once again displaced from their homes. Those experiences made questions of exile, belonging, and the human costs of conflict a central part of how I see the world.

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Today, I hold a PhD in Global & International Studies from University of California, Irvine, where my dissertation, Politics of Gendered Death: Exile and Belonging in the Shadow of Russia’s Existential Wars, examined how Russian men who fled their country after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine were represented in exile. I argued that in wartime Russia, masculinity becomes deeply tied to political belonging. Through what I conceptualized as the mediated politics of gendered death, men who refused militarized participation were increasingly framed not simply as political dissenters, but as failed men and failed citizens. Although these gendered expectations continued to follow exiles across borders, movement into post-Soviet borderlands created unstable and contradictory spaces where dominant ideas of masculinity could begin to break down, opening possibilities for alternative ways of being, belonging, and surviving.

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Teaching is another place where I connect these questions to the world around me. I invite students to think critically about how global conflicts, media representations, and everyday life are entangled. My goal is to create classrooms where students see themselves as part of global stories, where migration, war, and identity are not abstract, but connected to their own experiences and futures.

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The journey from Georgia to California, and from experiencing war as a teenager to analyzing its reverberations as a scholar, is what shapes both my research and my teaching today.