The Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies is pleased to announce that Léo Henry has been awarded the 2026-2027 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 2026 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 2026-2027 recipients here.
Léo Henry is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto. His research examines how national belonging structures social hierarchy in post-independence Estonia, drawing on field theory and cultural sociology to analyze how Estonianness organizes access to recognized positions across distinct domains of social life. Rather than treating nationalism as a uniform ideological force, his work asks how its structuring effects vary with the organization of social space – across cultural production, urban life, education, and intimate spheres – and how these effects intersect with class position, generation, and family history. He has published in Nations and Nationalism.
Project Overview
A central puzzle animating the project is the coexistence of cultural alignment and social segregation. Non-Estonian populations, and Russian in particular, increasingly acquire the dispositions recognized as legitimate within the national social space, yet patterns of separation across residential, occupational, and social domains remain durable. Henry’s work argues that this coexistence cannot be understood through cultural distance alone: it requires examining how field position shapes where alignment translates into recognition, and where it does not.
The AABS Dissertation Grant will support the completion of this comparative analysis across three fields – cultural production, urban neighborhood life, and intimate spaces – combining ethnographic fieldwork, life-history interviews, network analysis, and classic quantitative methods. A central methodological component is an original survey of Tallinn residents, designed to map the social space of the city relationally. The survey integrates values, justifications logics drawn from the sociology of worth, measures of cultural practices and tastes, alongside language practices, social network composition across, and historical memory items. The survey will also allow individual trajectories gathered through interviews and ethnographic observation to be interpreted as positioned within a structured social space, using Multiple Factor Analysis and geometrical methods. This integration of relational and quantitative-positional data is designed to make visible how national belonging, class, and cultural alignment jointly organize the social space.