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In 2012 the Kazickas Family Foundation established the Joseph P. Kazickas Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Yale to support the Baltic Studies program in the MacMillan Center's Council on European Studies. Since then nine Fellows from Lithuania already had a chance to advance their academic experience at Yale, including Spring 2020 Fellows, Vytautas Kuokstis and Stanislovas Stasiulis, who faced unexpected challenges and were forced to return home early due to COVID-19.
However, they still managed to make their presentations during their short time at Yale. V. Kuokstis worked on a research project dealing with the experience of the Baltic countries during the Great Recession of 2008-10, while S. Staniulis focused on utilizing Yale Library resources do find material for his ongoing research for article that will be published this year.
According to Baltic Studies Coordinator at Yale Bradley D. Woodworth, in-person group gatherings at Yale will be limited in the coming 2020-2021 academic year, and it is anticipated that all the events will be held remotely. Baltic Studies department is organizing events to be held over the Internet with scholars in both North America and the Baltic countries. There will be less in-person interactions for the incoming Baltic Studies fellows as Yale usually provides, but all the research resources of Yale will be at their full disposal and Baltic Studies Coordinator will be ready to help them in every way possible.
B. Woodworth is looking forward to welcoming the 2020-2021 Joseph P. Kazickas Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Gintare Venzlauskaitė to Yale in September 2020. Dr. Venzlauskaite is an instructor at the University of Sterling (Scotland, UK) and a Junior Researcher at Kaunas University of Technology. Her research at Yale will center on Lithuanian twentieth-century diasporas and the complexities attendant to return and repatriation. She received her Ph.D. degree in Central and East European Studies from the University of Glasgow in 2019. Her doctoral dissertation, “From Post-War West to Post-Soviet East: Manifestations of Displacement, Collective Memory, and Lithuanian Diasporic Experience Revisited,” draws on qualitative data collected in five countries in which live Lithuanians affected by World War II-era migrations westward and Soviet deportations to the east. At Yale she will be working to turn her dissertation into a monograph. The book will discuss displaced persons and the resulting diasporas as both implicated and implicating Lithuanian grand narratives and national identity, while also eliciting the importance of plurality of memory and the multivocality of diasporic experience.
She will be in residence at Yale from September through December 2020. Together with other Baltic Studies Fellows she is expected to give a presentation on her work at Yale toward the end of her stay.
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