05/12/2026
Lituanus invites you to the second webinar "Ukraine: Stories of Occupation," which will take place on July 2, 2026 (12 noon EDT/19:00 Kyiv/Vilnius time):
https://ggc-edu.zoom.us/j/83829370756
This webinar will focus on Neringa Klumbytė’s ethnographic fiction, “Ukraine: Stories of Occupation,” published in the Summer 2026 issue of Lituanus. Based on true stories, the work explores Russia’s occupation of Ukraine as an intimate and embodied experience, asking what happens to ordinary people, homes, animals, relationships, language, and memory when military violence becomes part of daily life. Our discussion will consider how the stories portray occupation as both physical violence and psychological transformation; how Russian propaganda shapes fear, dreams, and relationships among occupied civilians; what ethnographic fiction can reveal that conventional reporting or academic writing may not; and how Ukraine’s present war connects to broader histories of Soviet and Russian imperial violence.
Participants:
Neringa Klumbytė is Professor of Anthropology and East European Studies and Director of the Lithuania and Ukraine Program at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University as well as Senior Research Associate at Lithuanian Institute of History. Her research has explored authoritarianism and violence in 20th and 21st centuries; occupation; geopolitics of (in)security; Holocaust and genocide; memory and trauma; human rights and historical justice; political participation; propaganda and censorship; political satire and humor. She is the author of Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (Cornell UP, 2022), the winner of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Women’s Forum prize. She has been recognized as Miami University College of Arts and Science Distinguished Educator. She is President-Elect for the Society of the Anthropology of Europe of the American Anthropological Association.
Arvydas Grišinas is a Senior Researcher at Lithuanian Institute of History, working in the fields of political anthropology, social and political thought. He is an author of Politics with a Human Face: Identity and Experience in Post-Soviet Europe (2018), and The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century: As the Enlightenment Dims (2025). In 2025, he performed fieldwork and survey-based research on Lithuanian volunteers supporting Ukraine.
Yuliya Yurchuk is Associate Professor of History of Ideas at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She specializes in memory studies, history of religion, and the study of nationalism in East European countries. She is the author of the book Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Acta 2014). Her articles have appeared in Memory Studies, Nationalities Papers, Baltic Worlds, etc. She is one of the editors of “Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective” (Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Zuzanna Bogumil). Currently she is working on two projects; one is in the field of the transnational intellectual history funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, and another one is “HER-UKR: Challenges and opportunities for EU heritage diplomacy in Ukraine” funded by the ERASMUS+ Jean Monnet Policy Debate action. She is also working on the book about the environmental memory of the ongoing violence in Ukraine.
Moderator
Dovilė Budrytė is a professor of political science at Georgia Gwinnett College, and she is also an invited researcher at Vytautas Kavolis Transdisciplinary Research Center at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. Her publications include articles on various topics related to minority rights and memory politics, one single authored and six co-edited books, including Memory and Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases and Debates (co-editor with Erica Resende), and Defending Memory in Global Politics: Mnemonical In/Security and Crisis (co-editor with Erica Resende and Doug Becker). In 2022-24, she served as the president of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS). She currently serves as editor-in-chief of Lituanus, a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal.
