Vanue: Prof. Harald Brussow - KU Leuven University (Belgium).
Moderator: Prof. David Prangishvili (Academic Director, AETH).
Date: 22 September, 2019.
The Seminar - “Microbial Culture as Part of Human Culture”was held by the Academia Europaea Tbilisi Knowledge Hub (AETH) in Collaboration with Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages and Georgian Association of General and Applied Microbiology under the Distinguished Seminar Series - THE CROSSROADS at Tbilisi State University.
Abstract:
In the Neolithic Revolution humans domesticated crop plants and farm animals which changed human diet fundamentally leading from hunting and gathering to food production. The archeology and genetics of animal and plant domestication has been intensively studied. In contrast, the scientific study of food microbe domestication started only recently.

Anthropologists associate the local diversity of fermented food products with the ethnical identity of human groups since food mediates social cohesion and plays important roles in religious rituals and traditional medicine. Food microbes thus became an extended phenotype of the human races, necessitating fresh scientific approaches. The South Caucasus area with its complex ethnic composition and its long traditions of local fermented food products is an attractive research area for investigating the local differentiation of food microbes with ethnicity. Combined with selective omics technologies of artisanal starter systems and the establishment of a national strain collection by cultivation approaches, such a project would have both attractive applied (industrial development of new starter strains for food industry) and academic (ethnobiology) aspects.

Vanue: Prof. Ana Kharanauli (Tbilisi State University) and Prof. Michael Stone (Hebrew University of Jerusalem).
Moderator: Prof. David Prangishvili (Academic Director, AETH).
Date: 24 June, 2019.
The Seminar - “The Multiplicity of Literary Forms” was held by the Academia Europaea Tbilisi Knowledge Hub and the Center for Eastern Christian Studies under the DSS at Tbilisi State University.
Abstract:
Prof. Ana Kharanauli talked about the newly established Center of Eastern Christian Studies – the purpose and the aim of the Center. She said: “Today, when the idea of the unitary Europe is being searched, one can observe intensifying of conflicts between proponents of the national states and the global space, between Islamic and Christian worlds, the historical East has become a polygon of conflicts, one of the ways for overcoming the conflicts is in-depth study of cultural-historical roots. The geographical position of Georgia, its historical experience, its living religious tradition and also the novelty of the Georgian material, the experience in study of ancient languages (ancient Georgian, ancient Armenian, ancient Greek, Syriac, Hebrew) and culture provides the Center of Eastern Christian Studies established at the Iv. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University a well-grounded ambition for becoming a multidisciplinary research center the final aim of which is to study the in which the local traditions and national culture were developed and formed within the global Christian civilization.
In Prof. Michael Stone’s lecture was discussed Biblical text and Armenian retelling. In Armenian manuscripts numerous and varied compositions are found which re-tell or discuss, in one or another literary form, the narratives and other information found into the Old Testament. On one hand, these documents raise queries about how biblical material was learned and transmitted in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the extent and variety of re-uses of biblical material, raise questions about the attitudes to the Bible and its text as well as to the study of it. In this lecture Prof. Sone explored a number of types or genres of such biblically-related material and varieties of ways in which such texts relate to and make use of the biblical text.

Vanue: Prof. Levan Gigineishvili (Tbilisi State University) and Prof. Benedek Szigmund (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest).
Moderator: Prof. David Prangishvili (Academic Director, AETH).
Date: 20 June, 2019.
The Seminar - “European Dimensions of the Medieval Georgian School of Philosophy” was held by the Academia Europaea Tbilisi Knowledge Hub under the DSS at Tbilisi State University.
Abstract:
Prof. Levan Gigineishvili delivered lecture on “Platonic Theology of Ioane Petritsi and Intellectual Life in Byzantium”. In this lecture was discussed the history of philosophy in Byzantium in the medieval ages (Cappadocian Fathers who followed Alexandrian philosophical-theological tradition (Clement, Origen), Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite and Maximus Confessor on one hand, and another anti-intellectual and more mystical and prayers+ascetism oriented trend, clashes of these trends) and role and contribution of Ioane Petritsi, great Georgian philosopher and thinker of the 11th-12th cc.
Prof. Benedek Szigmund’s lecture was about international importance of the Kartvelian studies. As Prof. Szigmund said, importance of studies of the Georgian language, literature and, in general, the Georgian culture surpasses the limits of the Georgian cultural space, having a great importance for understanding regional and European cultural processes. The focus of the lecture was on the history and present state of studies on Georgian culture in Hungary, on the example of the activity of the Chair of Kartvelian Studies at the Eötvös Loránd University.