Dear friends and colleagues, I would like to extend Season’s Greetings and Best Wishes for the New Year 2026
Önskar alla ett Gott Nytt År 2026
ძვირფასო მეგობრებო და კოლეგებო, გილოცავთ შობა-ახალ წელს 2026

Looking back at 2025, it has been a challenging year in many respects. Let us hope that the New Year 2026 will come with health and happiness, peace and stability.

My year 2025 has been a year of writing and editing, and two anthologies are now in the pipeline. The first one out is an anthology, co-edited with Märta-Lisa Magnusson: We witnessed the Soviet break-up. Five Scandinavian researchers on the final years of the USSR, seen from the Caucasus. It will appear in the beginning of 2026.

This year, however, I was happy to see the appearance of a special issue of the European Journal of Minority Studies with special focus on Georgia. My contribution to this volume is entitled Language Use among speakers of Tsova-Tush. A field study in the late 1990s. Many thanks to co-author Manana Kobaidze and the editors for a fruitful collaboration. More info and abstracts: https://biblioscout.net/journal/ejm/18/1-2.

On March 6, I attended the European Studies and European Philology Workshop of the CEMES network “Thinking the European Republic of Letters”, bringing together researchers from the universities of Copenhagen, Lund, and Malmö. It was a pleasure to give the joint presentation Options and challenges for a European philology: AI & IT, and Georgia together with Christian Høgel, professor of Ancient/Byzantine Greek, Latin, and Modern Greek, Lund University (https://karinavamling.com/2025/03/07/workshop-on-european-philology/)

It was an honor to be invited to give a presentation at the 2025 Caucasus Studies Forum, University of Illinois: The Caucasus and its Regional Context. On the Research Platform “Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus Regional Research (RUCARR). The April Forum offered two full days of papers covering contributions by scholars from the US, Europe and the Caucasus (https://karinavamling.com/2025/04/26/invitation-to-2025-caucasus-studies-forum/)

In late September the International Conference Emigration and Literary Discourse was organized by the Shota Rustaveli Instutute of Georgian Literature & Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. The title of my online presentation at the conference was Emigrant culture in Sweden with focus on Georgian-Swedish literary contacts (https://karinavamling.com/2025/09/30/conference-on-emigration-and-literary-discourse/).

It was a great pleasure for me to see several of my good friends and colleages from Tbilisi, visiting in Sweden. We invited Prof. Alexandre Kukhianidze and Nana Janashia to Sweden for Easter, and they also had the opportunity to visit Malmö University and RUCARR.

Another dear colleague visiting from Tbilisi was Prof. Mariam Manjgaladze, who is involved in a collaboration between Caucasus University and Malmö University in the Erasmus framework.

In August, we we so happy to have our long-time, very good friend Tsitsino Tsikoridze visiting us. We were not only relaxing, but Tsitsino and Revaz were also discussing his work in progress on the Basque and Kartvelian languages.

As several yeas before, Batumi was our most frequently visited destination, with the sea, mountains and green parks all year around. And, of course, with its good Georgian food. This is the perfect writing retreat with a view on the Black sea. In clear weather, the snowy mountains are visible along the coastline.

This year we made a special trip, a form of journey we have not tried before. We enjoyed a cruise on the Mediterranean in June – before the heat wave! Pompei was probably the number one site visited, but Palermo and Malta were also very impressive.

Sabina’s new song Changes was released in the summer 2025. Thank you for this fantastic and inspiring song. Enjoy the beautiful melody and official music video here: https://youtu.be/nd4AsO0YPm0?si=dZY3StTr_HUWHB62

This year, sadly, our dear Nani Chanishvili left us. I have had the privilege of her support and kind and knowlegeable advice during most of my academic career, since I came to the Department of Modern Georgian at Tbilisi State University and Prof. Nani Chanishvili was appointed my PhD supervisor in 1987. So many good memories to look back at – https://karinavamling.com/…/prof-nani-chanishvili-in…/

Towards the end of the year, a beautiful Candle light consert opened the Christmas period. Thank you so much, Sabina, for this evening.