Yale Baltic Studies Visiting Fellows Reunion Conference Sterling Memorial Library, Lecture Hall
November 20 - 21, 2019
MACMILLAN CENTER Baltic Studies Program
Greetings from Yale Baltic Studies Program Donors Welcome! Having played a part in starting the Baltic Studies Program at Yale it gives me the greatest satisfaction to see it as an integral part of our University. My grandfather, Professor Ludvigs Bērziņš – a theologian, folklorist and educator – would be delighted to participate in this program and as a Latvian with a Yale education and strong Estonian roots on my father's side of the family, I can express nothing but enthusiasm for its evolution. Thank you to those of you who have worked to make it a reality. My special thanks must also go to those who have been the most generous of financial contributors and the university financial managers, whose wisdom will allow Yale Baltic Studies to exist and flourish into the future. Kristaps Juris Keggi, YC '55, YMed '59 Emeritus Elihu Professor of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation
To the Joseph P. Kazickas Fellows, When Dr. Joseph P. Kazickas emigrated to the United States in 1947 with his wife and daughter, it was the beginning of a new life filled with hope and uncertainty. But his journey would never have been possible without a generous grant from Yale University. It was because of this grant and the hard work that was required that Dr. Kazickas was able to obtain his Ph.D. and begin to realize the American dream of success and prosperity. He always reflected on how important that time was in his life and how one day he would give back to the University that gave him so much. So in 2012 Dr. Kazickas with his entire family and Bradley Woodworth met in East Hampton and formed the Joseph P. Kazickas Post-Doctoral Program. What better way to give back to the University than to have scholars from Lithuania and the Baltics benefit from the amazing resources and opportunities available at Yale as he had so many years ago. On behalf of the Kazickas Family and our team at the Kazickas Family Foundation, we are honored again to have these wonderful scholars back at Yale. You are part of a special group that we feel privileged to represent our Foundation. It is our hope that all of you will use your experience here to encourage others to see what Yale has to offer and take what you have gained here back to Lithuania and the Baltics. Nothing would have pleased Dr. Kazickas more. John A. Kazickas
I wish this Baltic Studies Reunion Conference much success. Juris would be gratified to understand that he has been instrumental in furthering the enrichment of outstanding pursuers of study of the Baltic countries. The scholars who take part in this program, choosing to become residents at Yale, are working in the field Juris was hoping to further by establishing the research fellowship. I send everyone greetings and look forward to hearing about the Conference. Ms. Gita Padegs
WELCOME Dear Joseph P. Kazickas and Juris Padegs Fellows, On behalf of the Yale University Baltic Studies Program and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, I welcome you all back for this first Yale Baltic Studies Fellows Reunion. We are very glad you could return to New Haven for these two days to let us know about your work and experiences following the time you spent at Yale as Baltic Studies Fellows. Since the creation in 2013 of the Joseph P. Kazickas Fellowship and the Juris Padegs Fellowship, we have brought sixteen scholars – seven Lithuanians, five Estonians, and four Latvians – to study and work at Yale. The 2019-2020 Padegs Fellow just arrived in New Haven and in January we expect two new Kazickas Fellows for the Spring 2020 semester. This reunion and the Yale Baltic Studies Program are made possible by the generosity of our Baltic Studies Program donors: Dr. Kristaps J. Keggi, M.D. (Yale College 1955, Yale School of Medicine 1959); the family of the late Dr. Joseph P. Kazickas (Yale PH.D. 1951); and the family of the late Mr. Juris Padegs (Yale College 1954, Yale Law School 1957). I would also like to thank the European Studies Council and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund for their support of this event. A key reason we have created this reunion is to give past Yale Baltic Studies Fellows the opportunity to meet and learn from each other. All of us at the MacMillan Center hope you find these two days at Yale productive and that you enjoy sharing your experiences with each other and with us! Sincerely,
Bradley D. Woodworth Baltic Studies Coordinator
DAY 1 ~ NOVEMBER 20 12:00 - 1:00 Lunch and Opening Remarks, Bradley Woodworth 1:00 - 2:30 Session I Eva Piirimäe (University of Tartu) Self-Determination of Peoples and the Principle of Nationality Andres Kurg (Estonian Academy of Arts) Estonians on the Scaffoldings: Single-Family Housing in Late Socialism Andris Saulītis (Riga Stradiņš University) The Debt and the Kin: Collateral Damage of the Insolvency Process 2:30 - 2:45 Coffee break 2:45 - 4:15 Session II Juhan Hellerma (University of Tartu) Discovering Historicity and the Cosmopolitan Perspective Inta Mieriņa (University of Latvia) Connecting with the Diaspora: Research and Practice in Latvia Mari-Liis Jakobson (Tallinn University) Political Engagement of Estonians Abroad 6:30 Dinner for Invited Guests
DAY 2 ~ NOVEMBER 21 9:00 - 10:30 Session III Vaidotas Vaičaitis (Vilnius University Law School) The Concept of Contemporary Constitutionalism – Some Reflections on My Time at Yale in 2017 Monika Kareniauskaitė (Central European University) Rethinking Soviet and Post-Soviet Violence: Crime and Gender Arvydas Grišinas (Kaunas University of Technology) Central and Eastern Europe in the Epoch of Post-Truth 10:30 - 10:45 Coffee break
10:45 - 12:15 Session IV Eneken Laanes (Under and Tuglas Literature Centre / Tallinn University) Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena Violeta Davoliūtė (Vilnius University) Writing About the Traumatic Past from Inside and Outside the Lithuanian Scholarly Tradition Jolanta Mickutė (Lost Shtetl Museum, Vilnius) The Lost Shtetl Museum: Jewish Museum-Making in the Digital Age 12:15 - 1:15 Lunch
1:15 - 2:45 Session V Irina Matijošaitienė (Verisk-ISO Insurance Analytics / Saint Peter’s University) The Impact of My Yale University Experience in My Career and Life Maija Spuriņa (Latvian Academy of Culture) Fall 2018 at Yale on My Academic Path Ardi Priks (Central European University) Reflections on Agricultural Politics in Europe Mindaugas Šapoka (Lithuanian Institute of History) Reflections on Work in the Early Modern Slavic and East European Collection at Yale 2:45 - 3:00 Coffee break 3:00 - 4:30 Session VI ~ Open discussion with all Fellows 6:30 Dinner for Invited Guests
FORMER & CURRENT FELLOWS Ieva Birka Fall 2015 Juris Padegs Fellow Ieva Birka is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Latvia, working on a threeyear research project titled “Harnessing the Economic Potential of the Diaspora.” The project aims to establish the best practices in diaspora engagement, specifically concentrating on the use of information and communication technology. As part of the project she recently completed a three-month research visit at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., where she published an article comparing the diaspora and immigration policies of the Baltic states. In addition to her work at Yale, she completed a post-doctoral research project at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland (2013-2014). She is the author and co-author of several publications focusing on issues of migration, social integration, feelings of belonging, dual citizenship, and diaspora. In addition, she has developed, and for the past three years implemented, a program at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga titled the “Future Leaders Academy” that aims to educate, inspire, and develop the leadership potential of future Latvian political and community leaders.
Violeta Davoliūte Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University, 2015-2016 Joseph P. Kazickas Fellow Violeta Davoliūtė is Professor at Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science and Senior Researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. In addition to her time spent at Yale, she has been a Fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (2018-2019). Professor Davoliūtė is author of The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War (2013). A specialist in matters of historical trauma, the politics of memory, and national identity, she has co-edited three volumes and published numerous articles in journals such as Ab Imperio, Osteuropa, Ethnologie Française, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, the Journal of Baltic Studies, and others.
Arvydas Grišinas Kaunas University of Technology, Fall 2017 Joseph P. Kazickas Fellow Arvydas Grišinas is a Researcher at Kaunas University of Technology and also teaches at Vilnius Academy of Arts and Vilnius University. He is the author of Politics with a Human Face: Identity and Experience in the Post-Soviet Europe (London, 2018), in which he analyzes the human side of the post-Soviet political transition as well as processes of political identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe. His academic interests span across politics, history, philosophy, and anthropology and focus on topics of post-Soviet human experiences, images, memory, and narratives, as well as ideas of Europe and the contemporary cultural and political challenges to the liberal West. His current research project explores the intellectual and political heritage of the anti-Soviet independence movements in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to the time spent at Yale, Dr. Grišinas has been a Visiting Researcher at Uppsala University (2018-2019), and he expects to be a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 2020.
Juhan Hellerma University of Tartu, Fall 2018 Juris Padegs Fellow Juhan Hellerma is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Tartu (Estonia). In addition to the Fall semester 2018 that he spent at Yale, he has been a visiting researcher at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and the University of Würzburg (Germany). His Ph.D. thesis presents a critical analysis of conceptual and methodological issues in current disputes on time and temporal experience. He pays special attention to the works of Reinhart Koselleck, whose philosophy of time lies at the center of his article “Koselleck on Modernity, Historik, and Layers of Time” (forthcoming in History and Theory). Another section of his thesis has been published in his article “Kas aeg on liigestest lahti? Uuemad arutelud aja üle ajaloos ja ajaloofilosoofias” [Is Time Out of Joint? Recent Discussions on Time in History and the Philosophy of History], which appeared in 2017 in Ajalooline ajakiri. Estonian Historical Journal. Mr. Hellerma is also a creative prose writer and poet. He is the author of Tühjusse, kaugusse [Into emptiness and distance] (Tallinn: Tuum, 2016).
Mari-Liis Jakobson Tallinn University, 2019-2020 Juris Padegs Fellow Mari-Liis Jakobson is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at Tallinn University. She is the Juris Padegs Research Fellow at Yale University. Her research interests include transnational citizenship and migration, in particular how the policies and politics of migration and citizenship shape citizenship as identity and practice. From 2014-2015 she was a visiting fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College London focusing on the role of Baltic civil society in London and dual citizenship policy in the Baltic States. Since 2016 she has worked as a researcher in Estonia for the European Migration Network. Since 2018 she has also served as a country expert for the Global Citizenship Observatory GLOBALCIT and has been a member of various working groups in Estonia dealing with migration and transnationalism policy.
Monika Kareniauskaitė Central European University, Spring 2019 Joseph P. Kazickas Fellow Monika Kareniauskaitė is head of a research project at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania) on gender-based violence in twentieth-century Lithuania. In the fall 2019 semester she is a visiting scholar in the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University. Dr. Kareniauskaitė’s work is on criminal law and criminal justice in Lithuania and in the Soviet Union after 1917. She also focuses on anti-Soviet resistance, Soviet political trials and deportations, the dissident movement, and historical memory and the culture of remembrance in the former Eastern Bloc and USSR. Dr. Kareniauskaitė is co-author and co-editor of the book Lithuanians and Poles Communism after 1956: Parallel Ways to Freedom? (Vilnius, 2015). Some of her most recent work appears in the article “Gulag Prisoners, Deportees and Their Family Members in the Lithuanian SSR Under and After Stalinism: Legal, Ideological and Social Definitions,” published in Histories (Un)Spoken: Strategies of Survival and Social-Professional Integration in Political Prisoners’ Families in Communist Central and Eastern Europe in the ’50s and ’60s (Münster, 2017). She is also working on a research project at Vilnius University titled “The Last Soviet Generation.”
Andres Kurg Estonian Academy of Arts, Spring 2017 Juris Padegs Fellow Andres Kurg is Professor of Architectural Theory and Visual Culture at the Institute of Art History, Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, and Senior Researcher at the Faculty of History in Vilnius University. His research explores the critical architectural practices in the Soviet Union from the 1960s to the 1980s in relation to technological and institutional transformations and modernization discourses. His recent publications include “Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations” (in The Journal of Architecture, vol. 24, no 5, 2019); “Werewolves on Cattle Street: Estonian Collective Farms and Postmodern Architecture” (in Second World Postmodernisms, ed. Vladimir Kulic London: Bloomsbury, 2019) and “Three Takes on the Environment” (in Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology, eds. Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, Ksenia Nouril (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018). He has been a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute and received research grants from the Graham Foundation and EU “Culture” program.
Eneken Laanes Under and Tuglas Literature Centre / Tallinn University, 2013-2014 Juris Padegs Fellow Eneken Laanes is Senior Researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at Tallinn University, and currently the KONE fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research interests include transnational memory, trauma studies, post-socialist memory cultures in Eastern Europe, the historical novel, critical theory and cultural analysis, and contemporary literature. She is the author of Lepitamatud dialoogid: subjekt ja mälu nõukogudejärgses eesti romaanis [Unresolved Dialogues: Subjectivity and Memory in the Post-Soviet Estonian Novel] (Tallinn, UTKK, 2009) and co-editor Photo credit: Piret Räni, Tallinn University of Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia (Helsinki: SKS, 2015). Professor Laanes is the coordinator of the Nordic research network Narrative and Memory: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (with Hanna Meretoja, www.narrativeandmemory.com). In 2020–2024 s he will work on her ERC Starting grant project “Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena.”
Irina Matijošaitienė Verisk-ISO Insurance Analytics / Saint Peter’s University 2013-2014 Joseph P. Kazickas Fellow Irina Matijošaitienė is a Lead Data Scientist at Verisk ISO Insurance Analytics and an Adjunct Professor in the Data Science program at Saint Peter’s University. She has also taught in the architecture program at Kaunas University of Technology. She has published her research findings in some 60 publications, presented (including as keynote speaker) at 35 conferences, and hason television and radio. Recent awards include NJ Tech Council for innovative data science research (2016), best research project (Academy of Sciences of Lithuania, 2018), and Environmental Systems Research Institute (USA) award for using geo-spatial data and artificial intelligence to develop a smart city (2019).
Jolanta Mickutė Lost Shtetl Museum, Vilnius, Spring 2017 Joseph P. Kazickas Fellow Jolanta Mickutė is Senior Researcher and Script Writer at the Lost Shtetl Museum, presently under development in Lithuania. Her research and writing examine various facets of the vanished shtetl civilization in modern Eastern Europe and Russia, with a particular focus on interwar Lithuania. She has worked as Assistant Professor of History at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania) and Academic Consultant at Vilnius University. Professor Mickute has held research fellowships in a number of countries, including Poland, Israel, Germany, and the United States. Her work has appeared in East European Politics and Society, Jewish Social Studies, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, and other publications.
Inta Mieriņa University of Latvia, Spring 2016 Juris Padegs Fellow Inta Mieriņa is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Director of the Center for Diaspora and Migration Research at the University of Latvia. A political sociologist by training, Professor Mierina has extensively studied social capital and formation of political attitudes. Her recent research focuses on new forms of migration, as well as integration of migrants and ethnic minorities. She has contributed to many large-scale international studies and has led several projects on migration, including the largest survey of Latvian emigrants that reached 14,068 Latvians in 118 countries. In addition to her work at Yale, she has studied migration as a Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Washington. Professor Mieriņa’s publications have appeared in Social Science Research, The Sociological Review, European Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, and she is a co-editor of a book about Latvian emigrant communities published in 2019 by Springer. She regularly provides policy recommendations in relation to migration and integration issues to policymakers in Latvia and contributes her expertise as a European Commission evaluation expert.
Eva Piirimäe University of Tartu, Spring 2017 Juris Padegs Fellow Eva Piirimäe is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu. Her research interests include early modern moral philosophy and political thought, the intellectual history of human rights and self-determination of peoples, and historical and contemporary debates about sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. She has recently introduced and co-edited (with Johannes Schmidt and Liina Lukas) a collection of articles titled Herder on Empathy and Sympathy (Leiden, forthcoming) and is currently completing a monograph titled Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Nationalism: Herder and Enlightenment. Professor Piirimäe has also co-edited (with Alexander Schmidt) a special issue of the journal History of European Ideas titled “Sociability in Enlightenment Thought” (2015), and she has published a number of articles in journals such as Global Responsibility to Protect, History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, and Eighteenth-Century Studies, Intellectual History Review, Acta Philosophica Fennica Ajalooline ajakiri: The Estonian Historical Journal. Her 2013 article “Humanität versus Nationalism as the Moral Foundation of the Russian Empire: Jegór von Sivers’ Herderian Cosmopolitanism” was awarded Estonian Historical Journal Prize for the Best Article of the Year (2012).
Ardi Priks Central European University, Spring 2018 Juris Padegs Fellow Ardi Priks is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Central European University (Budapest/Vienna). His work is on the political economy of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy reform. He spent much of 2017 working at the Estonian Permanent Representation to the European Union, advising on agricultural policy and aiding the Estonian diplomatic corps in Brussels in connection with the Estonian Presidency of Council of the European Union (July to December 2017). In addition to the time spent at Yale, Mr. Priks has been an exchange Ph.D. student at KU Leuven (Belgium). In 2019 he worked at the Policy Perspectives Unit of the DirectorateGeneral for Agriculture and Rural Development of the European Commission.
Mindaugas Šapoka Lithuanian Institute of History, Fall 2018 Joseph P. Kazickas Fellow Mindaugas Šapoka is Researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History. He is a historian of early modern Eastern and Central Europe, especially Poland and Lithuania. He is the author of Warfare, Loyalty and Rebellion: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Great Northern War (London, 2018). From 2015 to 2016 he held a Jacobite Trust Studies Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Dr. Šapoka is working on a book project titled “The Great Northern War, 1700-1721: the war which shaped Europe.” When completed, the book will be the first synthetic assessment of the war in any language. Dr. Šapoka emphasizes the crucial role of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the war, which marks the decline of Sweden as a major power and the rise of Russia’s military, political, and cultural hegemony in eastern and northern Europe.
Andris Saulitis Riga Stradiņš University, Fall 2017 Juris Padegs Fellow Andris Saulītis works as a fellow researcher at the Riga Stradiņš University, Latvia. His research interests are financial behavior of households, overindebtedness, and pro-sociality in credit markets. With training in social anthropology, as well as experimental methodology, he employs an interdisciplinary approach in his research projects. He is currently working on designing randomized controlled trials in Latvia with various state and private institutions to identify the causal mechanisms of behavioral change among households.
Maija Spuriņa Latvian Academy of Culture, Fall 2018 Juris Padegs Fellow A sociologist with specialties in cultural sociology, memory studies, digital cultural analytics, and digital humanities, Dr. Spuriņa is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Latvian Academy of Culture. Currently she is studying digitization of museum collections and its impact on national collective memory (supported by the European Regional Development Fund) using both qualitative research methods and big data analysis, including machine learning algorithms. She is also authoring the Nations in Transit 2020 report on democracy in Latvia. In her 2017 Ph.D. dissertation (New School for Social Research), “Cracks in a National Narrative of the Past: Three case studies of collective memory in post-Soviet Latvia,” she explored disparities between communicative, cultural, and political modes of memory that serve as “mnemonic cracks” – small yet politically significant challenges that do not break the narrative structure but, when followed up and reiterated, can lead to a liberalization and opening up of the political memory.
Vaidotas Vaičaitis Vilnius University, School of Law, Spring 2017 Joseph P. Kazickas Fellow Vaidotas Vaičaitis Associate Professor at Vilnius University’s School of Law. His research interests are in constitutional law, legal history and philosophy of law. He is co-author and editor of Lietuvos konstitucionalizmo istorija [History of Lithuanian constitutionalism] (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2016). He has written extensively on constitutional law, with articles published in Lithuanian, English, German, Polish, and Italian. Besides academic positions at Vilnius University, where he has worked since 1996, Professor Vaičaitis has also worked at the legal department of the Seimas (parliament) of the Republic of Lithuania (1993-1998); he has been a member of the Central Electoral Commission (2008-2012), and a member of the Permanent Commission for the Assessment of Activities of Judges (2014-2017). He is a scholarly expert at the Lietuvos mokslo taryba (Research Council of Lithuania) and since 2017 is the vice-chair of the Central Commission for Academic Ethics at Vilnius University. In addition to his time at Yale, Professor Vaičaitis has held fellowships at l’Institut de droit comparé de Paris (2002) and the Istituto di studi sui sistemi regionali federali e sulle autonomie (ISSiRFA CNR) in Rome (2006).
NOTES
Photography by: Doga Unlu
Sponsors: European Studies Council; Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund The Joseph P. Kazickas Fund for Lithuanian and Baltic Studies The Juris Padegs, Yale College Class of 1954 Fund for European Studies The Keggi-Berzins Fund for Baltic Studies