Dr. Tomas Balkelis received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Toronto in 2004. After graduation, he worked at the Universities of Manchester and Nottingham. During the last two years, he led a Lithuanian Research Council funded team of historians based at Vilnius University working on the international project 'Population Displacement in Lithuania in the XXth century' which focused on forced population transfers, refugee identities and displacement experiences between the Great War and the end of the Cold War. During 2009-2013, he was a European Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin. He is the author of The Making of Modern Lithuania (Routledge, 2009). His articles among other journals have been published by Past and Present and Contemporary European History. He has a particular interest in the modern history of Baltics, Russia, and Poland. His research fields include nation-building, national myth-making, population displacement and paramilitary violence. He is currently working on a monograph on paramilitarism in the Baltic States after the Great War.
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Igor Casu is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for the Study of Totalitarianism at the Faculty of History and Philosophy, State University of Moldova, Chisinau. In March 2000, Casu received his Ph.D. in History from Jassy University in Romania and was Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Lenoir University in North Carolina during fall semester that same year, during which he taught a masters course on Modern Balkan History. In 2010, he served as vice chairman of the Presidential Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Totalitarian Regime in the Republic of Moldova. Among his research interests are: Soviet Nationalities Policy and Political Repressions, Violence and Resistance in Soviet Moldavia during Stalinism and after 1953. Among his recent publications are: “The Fate of Stalinist Victims in Soviet Moldavia after 1953: Amnesty, Pardon and the Long Road to Rehabilitation”, in Kevin McDermott, Matthew Stibbe, eds., De-Stalinising Eastern Europe. The Rehabilitation of Stalin’s Victims, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and The Class Enemy. Political Repressions, Violence and Resistance in Moldavian (A)SSR, 1924-1956 (Cartier, 2015). His research project at Stanford is entitled A Moldavian Holodomor? Mass Famine in MSSR, 1946-1947.
Gábor Egry is Head of the Research Department and Senior Research Fellow at Institute of Political History in Budapest, Hungary. He holds a PhD from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. Egry is an historian whose research interests include nationalism, everyday ethnicity, identity politics, economic history, memory politics, gastronomy and nationalism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. He has held fellowships from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Bucharest, and Jena, among others. His recent book Etnicitás, identitás, politika. Magyar kisebbségek regionalizmus és nacionalizmus között Csehszlovákiában és Romániában, 1918-1944 (Ethnicity, identity, politics. Hungarian minorities between regionalism and nationalism in Czechoslovakia and Romania, 1918-1944) was published in 2015 by Napvilág, Budapest. He is the principal investigator of the research project: Negotiating post-imperial transitions, 1918-1925. A comparative study of local and regional transitions from Austria-Hungary to the successor states, funded by the Hungarian National Research Fund.
Dates in Residence: February 2014 - December 2015
Svitlana Khutka is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" in Ukraine, an expert of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, and Associate Researcher of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (Higher School of Economics). In 2012-2013 Khutka was a Carnegie Fellow at the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studes at the University of Washington-Seattle and at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2010 and 2012-2013 she was awarded the "Best Young Sociologist of Year in Ukraine" for her comparative studies of post-socialist transformations and received the silver medal of Natalia Panina, one of the most prestigious prizes in the field of Social Sciences of Ukraine. As a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University through the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from February 2014-December 2015, Dr. Khutka will pursue her research project, “Civic Political Apathy/Involvement, Governance and Values in Transition Countries,” which focuses on multifaceted shifts in political culture with an emphasis on the Ukrainian case.
Daniel Orlovsky is Professor of History and George A. Bouhe Research Fellow in Russian Studies at Southern
Methodist University. Dr. Orlovsky has been Visiting Professor of History at Stanford and UC Berkeley, studied Russian language at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA, and served as Chair of the Board of Directors of NCEEER. He has published on Russian social and political history, particularly questions of bureaucracy and the role of white collar workers (the “hidden class”) in the late Imperial and Soviet eras. He currently works on a variety of projects related to the coming Centennial of the Russian Revolution, especially the February Revolution and the Russian Provisional Government of 1917. Among these are Companion to the Russian Revolution (Wiley Blackwell, forthcoming, 2017), a volume of edited documents in the Yale Annals of Communism series and work as co-convener of the triennial colloquium marking the Revolution Centennial to be held in St. Petersburg, June 2016 at the European University (with co-sponsorship of the Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences).
Klaus Segbers is Professor of Political Sciences at the Institute for East European Studies and the Department for Political Sciences at Freie Universitaet Berlin. In addition, Segbers is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Director of the Center for Global Politics at Freie Universitaet Berlin, the latter of which offers blended learning programs for students and professionals in China, Southeast Asia, Mena, Iran, and Russia. Klaus Segbers's research interests are: globalizing city regions; European and German external behavior; institutional changes in Russia and China; and structural limits of national governments' performances. He is a frequent commentator on German and international television and radio programs.
Aurimas Švedas is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of History, Vilnius University. His area of research is the history of historiography, history politics, communicative and cultural memory, and oral history. As a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University he will pursue his research project, “Red Knights: The KGB between Myth and Reality,” exploring the thesis that opposing discourse and memory models in Soviet and post-Soviet times did not dispel, but rather strengthened, the myth of the omnipotent and omnipresent KGB. Aurimas’ most recent books are: Painting was Like a Door: Aurimas Švedas Speaks with Petras Repšys; Episodes for a Final Film: Film Director Almantas Grikevičius (both in the Lithuanian language, 2013), In the Captivity of the Matrix: Soviet Lithuanian Historiography, 1944–1985, (Rodopi, 2014).
