Journal of Baltic Studies

Journal of Baltic Studies (JBS), the official journal of AABS, is a vital source of scholarship for those engaged in Baltic state and Baltic Sea region studies. JBS is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal published on a quarterly basis that aims at progressing and disseminating knowledge about the political, social, economic, and cultural life – both past and present – of the Baltic states and the Baltic Sea region. JBS seeks high-quality original articles and review of broad scholarly interest that advance knowledge of the Baltic states and Baltic Sea region.

Editorial Board

Editor-in-Chief

Matthew Kott, Uppsala University

Matthew Kott is a historian based at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University in Sweden. 

Matthew has a long relationship with JBS. It was one of his favorite journals to browse in the library stacks as an undergraduate at Carleton University in Ottawa, and JBS articles appear in the bibliography of his undergraduate thesis on the Latvian Bolshevik, Pēteris Stučka. He started his own subscription to JBS as an AABS Baltic member, while working at the Occupation Museum in Riga. As a doctoral student at Oxford, his first peer-reviewed publication was an article in JBS coauthored with Heinrihs Strods on the March 1949 Deportations, which remains one of his most widely cited works. In 2009, now a researcher at Uppsala University, he took on the role of Reviews Editor for JBS, a position that he enjoyed so much, he held it for almost a decade. In 2017, he fulfilled a long-standing dream of being appointed the Editor of JBS.

In addition to his work on history and contemporary politics of Latvia, Matthew’s other research and teaching expertise includes topics such as the genocide of Europe’s Romani minorities, the Nazi occupation of Norway, and then history of racial ideology in Northern Europe. Together with Terje Emberland, he wrote the groundbreaking study of the SS in Norway, Himmlers Norge: Nordmenn i det storgermankse prosjekt (Aschehoug, 2012). He is a recognized expert for the Latvian Science Council, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the UK.

Editor

Michael Loader, University of Glasgow

Michael Loader is a Lecturer in Soviet political history with a focus on the history of national communism in Soviet Latvia.

Michael began working for the journal in 2018 while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden (2017-2020) as an editorial assistant. Since then, he has risen through the ranks to become an Editor of the journal.

Michael’s PhD thesis at King’s College London (2011-2015) examined the history of the Khrushchev Thaw in Soviet Latvia in the 1950s and early 1960s. He held a postdoc at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (2016-2017) and was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Glasgow (2020-2023). He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. Michael’s research interests include the workings of the Soviet Communist Party, nationality politics and centre-periphery relations in the Soviet Union, particularly Soviet Latvia.

Michael was the lead organizer of the conference, “Latvia at a Crossroads: The Centenary of the Latvian State” funded by the Bank of Sweden’s Jubilee Fund, which resulted in the publication of an edited volume with Matthew Kott entitled, Defining Latvia: Recent Explorations in History, Culture, and Politics (2022, CEU Press).

Technical Coordinator

Siobhán Hearne, University of Manchester

Siobhán Hearne is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the history of medicine, healthcare, gender, and sexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. She is the author of Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (OUP, 2021) and her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Past & Present, Slavic Review, English Historical Review, Gender & History, and Europe-Asia Studies

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Editorial Assistant

Harry C. Merritt, University of Vermont

Harry C. Merritt has been an Editorial Assistant with the Journal of Baltic Studies since 2023. He is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in History and Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. Harry earned a Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 2020. Harry’s book, Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service, is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. His work has also been published in the Journal of Modern European HistoryNationalities PapersThe Journal of Baltic Studies, and REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.

Editorial Assistant

Josh Hodil, Pomona College

Josh Hodil is the Westergaard Postdoctoral Fellow at Pomona College where he teaches Scandinavian, Russian, and European history. His research examines the relationship between Russia and Denmark in the early modern period and his current book project focuses on three royal marriage projects negotiated between Moscow and Copenhagen in the seventeenth century.

Editorial Assistant

James Montgomery Baxenfield, Tallinn University

James Montgomery Baxenfield is a Junior Research Fellow and doctoral candidate at Tallinn University. His doctoral research examines ideas of establishing a Latvian-Lithuanian state during the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2022, he was the recipient of a Baumanis Grant for Creative Research in Baltic Studies from AABS, and a guest co-editor of the special issue “Recognition: de facto and de jure” for Acta Historica Tallinnensia (Vol 28, No. 2). In 2023, he was a visiting fellow at the Herder Institute in Marburg, and he received a Dissertation Grant for Graduate Students from AABS. James also researches the history of American football, particularly in relation to the Baltic region and within Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian diasporas.

Editorial Assistant

Sandra Hagelin, University of Tartu

Sandra Hagelin is a Junior Research Fellow and PhD Candidate at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu. Her research interests concern borders, discourses, and space and identity formation, with a particular focus on the Baltic Sea Region and the narrative constructions of border-related issues in the Nordic and Baltic contexts.

Reviews Editor

Paula Oppermann, Historical Commission Berlin

Paula Oppermann’s research focusses on the history of fascism and antisemitism, the Holocaust and its commemoration in Latvia and Germany. She is currently a researcher at the Historical Commission Berlin working on the project “The Berlin Gestapo Reports 1933-1936. A Source Edition.” She previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and as a curator at the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre. She studied History and Baltic Languages at the University of Greifswald and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Uppsala University. She received her PhD at the University of Glasgow with a thesis about Latvia’s fascist and antisemitic party Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross) which was awarded the Fritz Theodor Epstein Prize and the George L. Mosse First Book Prize. She presented her research at international conferences including AABS and CBSE, and received fellowships from the Claims Conference, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute and the Institute for Contemporary History Munich.

Contact Information

Email:
jbs [at] ires.uu.se

Postal address:
Journal of Baltic Studies
Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Uppsala University
Box 514
SE-751 20 Uppsala
SWEDEN
Tel. +46 18 471 1630

About the Journal of Baltic Studies

Published quarterly by the AABS, the annual fee for both membership in the Association and a subscription to JBS is $60.00, $25.00 for full-time students, and $35.00 for emeritus members. Members of the Association receive a free personal subscription to the Journal.

Journal of Baltic Studies is noted in American Bibliographical Center, Bibliographie Linguistique/Linguistic Bibliography (BL), Bibliography of the History of Art, Current Contents / Arts & Humanities, Historical Abstracts, MLA Abstracts of the Modern Languages Association, SCOPUS, Thomson Reuters Arts & Humanities Citation Index® (A&HCI), Thomson Reuters Social Sciences Citation Index® (SSCI).

The Association acknowledges with gratitude the support of the IRES Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University, towards the editorial functions of JBS.

Manuscripts 

All submissions should be made online at the Journal of Baltic Studies ScholarOne Manuscripts site. New users should first create an account. Once a user is logged onto the site submissions should be made via the Author Centre. For publication policies, please consult the Style Guide. For more information, see Instructions for Authors page.

Book Reviews 

All book review requests and copies of books to be reviewed should be sent to the Journal’s Book Reviews Editor:

Liisi Esse
352A Green Library
Stanford, CA 94305-6004
USA
liisi.esse [at] stanford.edu

Vilis Vītols Article Prize

The Vilis Vītols annual award of $500 is presented to the author of the best article in a given year of the Journal of Baltic Studies. The best article is selected by a committee appointed by the AABS board. Priority is given to articles that encompass more than one Baltic country and thus expressly represent Baltic Studies.

The 2022 and 2023 winners were announced in May 2024.

CFA: Journal of Baltic Studies Editor

Journal of Baltic Studies (JBS), the official journal of AABS, is currently recruiting for an Editor. This role is a great opportunity for an academic with a strong research background in the political, social, economic, and cultural life of the Baltic states and, by...