Lois Kalb Awarded 2025-2026 Dissertation Grant

May 4, 2025

The Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies is pleased to announce that Lois Kalb has been awarded the 2025-2026 Dissertation Grant for Graduate Students.

AABS awards grants of up to $4,000 to support doctoral dissertation research and write-up in any field of Baltic Studies. Funds may be used for travel to research site, equipment, duplication or other needs as specified.

Proposals are evaluated according to the scholarly potential of the applicant, and the quality and scholarly importance of the proposed work, especially to the development of Baltic Studies. Applicants must currently be enrolled in a PhD or MA program and have completed all requirements for a PhD/MA except the dissertation. Applicants must be members of the AABS at the time of submitting their application.

The 2025 applications were evaluated by the AABS 2025-2026 Grants and Awards Committee consisting of AABS VP for Professional Development Dr. Kaarel Piirimäe, AABS President Dr. Jörg Hackmann, and AABS Director-at-Large Dr. Dovilė Budrytė. Learn about the other 2025-2026 recipients here.

A smiling woman in a gray jacket

Lois Kalb is a PhD candidate in History at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy and is currently a student research affiliate of the partnership project “Deindustrialization and the Politics of our Time.” In 2023, she was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. Prior to joining the EUI, Kalb obtained a master’s degree from the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, where she studied history and anthropology.

 

Project Overview: Uncommonly Modern
Lois Kalb’s dissertation Uncommonly Modern: Mass Housing, Moral Economy and Urban Social Change in Late and Post-Soviet Riga (1970-2000) focuses on the lived experiences of moving to and growing up in Riga’s mass housing estates in dialectic with larger-scale historical processes of Latvia’s annexation by the Soviet Union, the Soviet collapse, and the making of an independent Latvian state in the 1990s. It builds on a variety of sources, such as oral history interviews with both Latvian and Russian-speaking inhabitants of the districts, newspaper articles, photographs, film material and administrative documents. The project demonstrates that Soviet era mass housing blocks in Riga and their changing property structures were an essential component in shaping differing forms of sociality, antagonisms, meaning and affect. By doing this, the dissertation underscores the particularity of Riga’s housing estates in the history of (Soviet) mass housing. Kalb will use the AABS dissertation grant three-fold: to assist the write-up period in the fall of 2025, to fund the duplication of archival material and interview transcripts and –lastly – to subsidize a final research trip to Riga.