Maka Elbakidze – Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Deputy Director of TSU Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature. Area of research interests: Rustaveli studies; the history of old and modern Georgian literature, comparative studies. She is an author of more than 100 academic articles and two monographs: 1. Some Issues in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin in Typological Relation to the Medieval French Chivalric Romance (2007); 2. Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin in the Context of World Literature (2018, in English, Lambert Academic Publishing). She is a co-author of Georgian Literature, published in Germany in 2016 by Pop Verlag Publishing House and editor and co-author of Identifying Cultural Intersections in the Works of Shota Rustaveli and Nizami Ganjavi, published in 2024 by Cambridge Scholar Publishing. She participated in numerous international and local academic conferences; she has been a Principle investigator and a key personnel of multiple academic grant projects, including those funded by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation such as Georgian Literature and the World Literary Process (2012-2014); Intercultural Space: Rustaveli and Nizami (2017-2020). She is the Editor–in-Chief of the annual academic journal Literaturuli Dziebani (Literary Researches) and a member of the editorial board of the H-indexed journal Sjani. Professor Elbakidze is a member of the Georgian Association of Comparative Literature (GCLA), and member of International Comparative Literary Association (ICLA).