Visiting Scholars & Student Fellows

Vita Raskevičiute is currently pursuing an MA in European and Russian Studies at Yale University. Born and raised in Lithuania, her interests converge at the crossroads of democratization and the formation of national identity within the post-Soviet landscape. Vita obtained her B.A. in International Relations and Russian and East European Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her Senior Thesis, titled “Hybrid Warfare of Coercive Migration: Political Calculus of Turkey and Belarus,” was awarded the Norman D. Palmer Prize for the Best Senior Thesis in International Relations. This research project delved into the conditions propelling illiberal regimes to utilize migration as a coercive tool, and how these regimes glean insights from each other’s hybrid warfare tactics.

As a Wolf Humanities Undergraduate Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Vita also worked on a research project named “On the Brink of Independence: Public Opinion of What It Means to Be Lithuanian.” By drawing from a collection of more than a hundred letters addressed to the Lithuanian Reformation Movement in the late 1980s, this project reconstructed the prevailing national ethos that Lithuanians shared just before their country’s independence from the Soviet Union became a certainty.

During the past summer, Vita completed a traineeship at the European Parliament. Her involvement with the European Union’s Eastern Partnership countries—examining their political and civil society trajectories along with their prospects of European integration—has stoked her eagerness to delve deeper into the divergent outcomes of democratization within the region. She is keen to uncover the factors contributing to these discrepancies at Yale. Furthermore, her interest lies in investigating how societies in the post-Soviet sphere forge a consensus on their countries’ political trajectories, as well as understanding how national myths, symbols, and collective memory can serve as multidirectional tools to either drive or reverse democratic backsliding.

Rūta Petkutė completed her Ph.D. in Social Sciences at Tallinn University in 2022. In her doctoral thesis, “The Instrumentalization of Academic Lifeworlds, Knowledge, and Education: Lithuanian Academics’ Responses to the European Higher Education Policy of Curriculum Restructuring,” she uses a sociological perspective to explore the implications of the European Bologna reforms of higher education in Lithuania.

Dr. Petkutė argues that the neoliberal reforms in Europe signify a problematic cultural shift from the continental idea of the university as a site for pursuing different kinds of knowledge toward a more instrumental Anglo-American notion of the university as a source of immediately applicable knowledge. She finds that academics tend not to internalize the change and implement it only formally. They resist the reform, seeing it not as an educational, but as a prescribed economically-driven project that steers academic life towards instrumental ends.

At Yale Dr. Petkutė will work on a book “Exchanging Tyrannies: The Human Implications of Neoliberal Policies in a Post-Soviet Country,” which presents the thesis of exchanging tyrannies as a way of exploring the social and human consequences of neoliberal politics in the context of post-Soviet Lithuania. In this book she is collaborating with British sociologist Ivor Goodson.

Maksimas Milta is a master’s student in the European and Russian Studies program. Originally from Lithuania, he joined Yale with a professional career tracking at the intersection of higher education management, policy analysis, and media.

For eight years, Maksimas worked at the European Humanities University, Vilnius-based Belarusian University-in-Exile, leading communications and development. By ensuring $18M of international donors’ support, 1400 young Belarusians have received indoctrination-free rigorous higher education during his tenure. In a part-time capacity, Maksimas lectured early 20th-century Western European literature and the intellectual history of Vilnius to freshmen students.

Since the beginning of the protests in August 2020, he commented on developments in Belarus for leading Baltic, Nordic, Polish, German, Swiss, Dutch media, Le Figaro, Times Higher Education, BBC World News, the New York Times, and others. Later, in 10 episodes of ‘Talaka’, his first documentary show on the Lithuanian National TV, Maksimas explored the role of women in mobilizing the Belarusian society. Recognizing his on-the-ground reporting from Belarus, Maksimas received the annual Titan award by Delfi, Lithuania’s largest media portal.

At Eastern Europe Studies Center’s Belarus Research Program, Maksimas has analyzed Belarus’ societal, economic, and security policy and co-hosted Minsk Express, a bilingual monthly podcast. In 2021, Maksimas received ReThink.CEE Fellowship at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, analyzing Higher Education as a Source of the soft power of the European Union in Eastern Partnership Countries.

At Yale, Maksimas continues to study the role of higher and civic education in countering the despotic regimes and developing practical tools and policy frameworks to offset the democratic backlash.

Maksimas holds a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Heritage (cum laude) from the European Humanities University and a master’s degree in Political Sciences from Vilnius University. During that time, he served as Vice President at the Lithuanian National Union of Students and as an elected representative at the European Students’ Union.

Ingrid Ruudi is Researcher and Visiting Associate in the Estonian Academy of Arts, in Tallinn. She completed her Ph.D. in the Academy’s Institute of Art History and Visual Culture in 2020. Her dissertation, titled “Spaces of Interregnum: Transformations in Estonian Architecture and Art 1986-1994,” received special recognition from Estonia’s National Heritage Board.

Dr. Ruudi’s work is centered on the interrelationship of society and space – the way differing social formations generate their own spatial configurations and create differing subjectivities, thus contributing to the shaping of these environments and conditioning – or challenging – social norms and possibilities. She also has a long-standing interest in feminist approaches to architectural design and analysis of patterns of spatial use. In 2019 she curated a major research exhibition: A Room of One’s Own: A Feminist’s Questions to Architecture at the Estonian Museum of Architecture.

At Yale Dr. Ruudi will study spaces of care in late Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia: maternity hospitals, orphanages, mental health institutions, nursing homes for the elderly and the disabled, analyzing how the spatial arrangements contributed to the construction of marginalized subjectivities of the society.

Kristina Jõekalda is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In 2018 she was a Visiting Fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Her doctoral dissertation German Monuments in the Baltic Heimat? A Historiography of Heritage in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ (Tallinn 2020) examines architectural monuments in the Baltic region as eyewitnesses to historical processes and considers their representation in subsequent art historiography. She has published widely in the field and co-edited special issues of journals such as European Peripheries of Architectural Historiography (The Journal of Architecture 2020) and the book A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 2019).

At Yale Dr. Jõekalda will work on several articles that engage with the institutional history of heritage preservation, discussions over Germanness and colonialism, and the continuing influence of the Baltic Germans during the interwar era and beyond.

Ksenija Iljina is a Ph.D. researcher at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL). At Yale she is continuing work on her doctoral thesis, which examines the uses of Soviet mythologies and ritual practices, especially in contemporary Latvia. She considers how Russia as a post-imperial state exerts its soft-power influence in post-Soviet states through nostalgia for the Soviet past and how these states are responding. Her research centers on heritage, memory, and identity construction in the Baltic region.

In 2017 Ms. Iljina received an M.A. in Arts and Cultural Management from King’s College London (Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries). Before this she completed a B.A. degree in Russian Philology at the University of Latvia. Her broader research interests include Russian and Slavonic Studies, Baltic Studies, and Cultural Memory and Social Anthropology.

Kaarel Piirimäe is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Tartu and Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Cambridge with a thesis on the Big Three Allies and the Baltic Question in World War II (published 2014). Professor Piirimäe has edited several volumes and special journal issues on the history of the Baltic states in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on international history. His article “Liberals and Nationalism: E. H. Carr, Walter Lippmann and the Baltic States from 1918 to 1944” won the Vilis Vītols prize for the best article in the Journal of Baltic Studies in 2017. As a Fulbright Scholar at Yale, Professor Piirimäe is working on the early post-Cold War era in the Baltic region, a book project on US-Baltic relations from 1922 to 2022, and George F. Kennan’s engagements with and views on the Baltic region during the “American century.”

Photo Credit: Minerva Juolahti

Solvita Denisa-Liepniece is Assistant Professor at Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences in Valmiera, Latvia. Her research interests are strategic political communication, intercultural communication, and information resilience. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Antwerp in 2013 with a thesis on political communication in post-Soviet Belarus. Dr. Denisa-Liepniece serves as the country expert for several international organizations focused on media literacy and information resilience in the Baltic countries. At Yale she is studying the (re)construction of memory of Latvia and the Baltic states in Russia’s state-sponsored education discourse. She is co-author of several books on communication and media and published in 2019 a fairy tale for children on media literacy (also translated in Russian and Romanian). In addition to academic activities, Dr. Denisa-Liepniece has also had a career as a professional journalist and worked for Public Broadcasting of Latvia in the fields of both television and radio for more than fifteen years.

Gintare Venzlauskaitė is an instructor at the University of Stirling (Scotland, UK), a Research Affiliate at the University of Glasgow, and a Junior Researcher at Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania). Her research centers 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.

Monika Kareniauskaitė is Senior Historian-Researcher at the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania. Her work is on criminal law and criminal justice in Lithuania and in the Soviet Union after 1917. She also focuses on anti-Soviet resistance, Soviet political trials and deportations, the dissident movement, and historical memory and the culture of remembrance in the former Eastern Bloc and the USSR. In 2017 she received a Ph.D. in History from Vilnius University, where she also completed B.A. and M.A. degrees in History. She has been a Research Fellow at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland (2013-2014), and a project coordinator and research assistant at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial (2015-2016). Link to full bio.

Ardi Priks is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Central European University (Budapest).  His work is on the political economy of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy reform.  He holds a master’s degrees in International Relations and European Studies from the Central European University and in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam.  He finished his undergraduate education in Government and Politics at the University of Tartu (Estonia).  Link to full bio.

Andris Saulītis is a Ph.D. candidate in Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, and his completing his doctoral thesis on how individuals in current-day Latvia are coping with overindebtedness.  He holds master’s degrees from Rīga Stradiņš University and the New School for Social Research (New York City), and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Latvia. Link to full bio.

Eneken Laanes is the Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Culture Analysis at Tallinn University and Senior Researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. Her research deals with transnational memory and transcultural memorial forms in post-Soviet memory cultures of Eastern Europe. Laanes studied comparative literature at the University of Tartu, University of Bologna (Spring 2001), and the Free University of Berlin (2003–2004). She was a Juris Padegs Research Fellow at Yale University in 2013–2014. Link to full bio.