Webinar: Confronting the Truth: Pursuit of Historical Justice in the Baltic States and Beyond

Neringa Klumbytė is Professor of Anthropology and Russian and Post-Soviet Studies and Director of the Lithuania Program at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University. She is the author of Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (Cornell UP, 2022), the winner of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Women’s Forum prize; a co-author of Social and Historical Justice in Multiethnic Lithuania (2018), and co-editor of Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85 (2012). Her recent research has focused on state violence and political participation in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Holocaust and genocide, sovereignty, human rights, and historical justice. 

Dovilė Budrytė is Professor of Political Science at Georgia Gwinnett College, and she works on EUROPAST project at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. She also serves as Invited Researcher at Vytautas Kavolis Transdisciplinary Research Institute at Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania). Her research interests include memory politics, trauma, Holocaust justice and gender studies. Her publications include articles on various topics related to minority rights and memory politics, one single authored and five co-edited books, including Memory and Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases and Debates (co-editor with Erica Resende), and Defending Memory in Global Politics: Mnemonical In/Security and Crisis (co-editor with Erica Resende and Doug Becker, 2025). In 2015, she was the recipient of the University System of Georgia Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2022-24, she served as the President of AABS (Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies).

Matthew Kott is an historian at Uppsala University, primarily focusing on the contemporary history of Latvia, particularly the events surrounding World War II. He has written and taught extensively about the German occupation and Nazi genocide in Latvia and the wider Baltic Sea region. Together with Terje Emberland, he wrote the ground-breaking study of the SS in Norway, Himmlers Norge: Nordmenn i det storgermanske prosjekt (Aschehoug, 2012). Since 2017, he has been editor of Journal of Baltic Studies.

Daria Cherkaska is a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at the Centre of Archaeology at University of Huddersfield. Currently, she is working on the project “Pogrom and Holocaust mass graves in Ukraine: current situations and future solutions,” funded by Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. She specialises in both the history and archaeology of the Holocaust. She holds a PhD in the history of Ukraine from Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, and her thesis focused on the theory and history of Soviet archaeology (2018). In 2022, she submitted her second doctoral thesis entitled “The application of forensic archaeological methods for Holocaust Studies in Ukraine.” Dr Cherkaska has also worked as a Research Assistant at the Centre of Archaeology (2018-2022). She worked as a Research and Fieldwork Assistant on recent projects in Poland, Ukraine and the UK. Dr Cherkaska also has experience working as an archivist (2016-2018), and in the field of conservation of archaeological sites. She was awarded a Yad Vashem Grant for Doctoral Students and Young Scholars in 2022.

Fabio Belafatti is a Teaching Assistant at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, part of Vilnius University’s Faculty of Philosophy, and a Phd student at the Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG) of the University of Groningen. His research centres on the application of Postcolonial theory to the study of the discursive construction of the notion of “Eastern Europe”. In particular, he focuses on the identification and deconstruction of patterns of orientalization towards the countries of the region in “Western” public and media discourses. 

Jörg Hackmann (PhD, Free University Berlin) is Alfred Döblin Professor at the Department of History, University of Szczecin, Poland, and since 2021 Director of the International Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Szczecin. He is also associated with the University of Greifswald, Germany, and serves as Vice-President of the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council (Germany). Jörg Hackmann holds a PhD from the Free University Berlin and received his habilitation at Greifswald University. He has been a visiting scholar at many universities in the Baltic sea region as well as in Chicago. Publications focus on the history of North-Eastern and East Central Europe, in particular on historiography, memory cultures, civil society and regionalisms with a focus on transnational entanglements. Most recent publications include Geselligkeit in Nordosteuropa (Sociability in North-Eastern Europe), Harrassowitz 2020. Current research interests include the role of history in Baltic Sea region building, a biography of Werner Hasselblatt, and the Jewish topography of (German) Szczecin.

He served as President-Elect of AABS from 2022–2024 and currently serves as President of AABS.