Doctoral Student in Anthropology and History
About
Oto Gulbani is a first-year doctoral student in the University of Michigan's History and Anthropology joint PhD program. His work, situated within an interdisciplinary framework of historical sociology and political epistemology, studies the sociopolitical processes that underpinned the formation of modern sciences in the Soviet Union, with a narrower focus on the Georgian SSR.
Oto received a bachelor's degree in Social Sciences from the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia, where he worked on the history of mountainous Svaneti in the 19th century. Gulbani continued the same line of historiographical inquiry at Central European University, where he received a master's degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology with the defense of a thesis entitled "Backward and Deficient: Exploring Soviet Imaginations and the Modernization of Svaneti, 1920s–1930s." Based on the thesis, he recently published an article on Soviet modernization of Svaneti and the creation of medicalized subjectivities as part of the Soviet modernizing effort.
