Dr. Zigmas Vitkus

Dr. Zigmas Vitkus is a research fellow at the Institute of Baltic Region History and Archeology, Klaipėda University and a freelance publicist. He is a graduate of Vilnius University, Faculty of History and Centre for Religious Studies and Research. His research interest inlcude politics of memory, culture of memorials, with the focus on memorials in genocide places. In 2019, he defended his doctoral thesis at Klaipėda University. He is the author of a monograph Paneriai (Ponar), the Forest of Remembrance: History, Culture and Politics (2022), and a co-author of Jewish Soldiers in the 16th Rifle Division: History and Recollections (2022).

Dr. Viktorija Serbentienė

Dr. Viktorija Serbentienė studied in the Faculty of History of Vilnius University in 2008-2014, later, in 2014-2022, she entered a joint Ph.D. program in ethnology offered by the Lithuanian Institute of History, Vytautas Magnus University and Klaipėda University. In 2023, she defended her dissertation “Meanings of Vernacular Architecture: A Contemporary Detached Residential House in Vilnius County.“ Her research interests include history of architecture, ethnicity, contemporary architecture, and environmental anthropology. ORCID iD: orcid.org/0000-0002-7587-9844

Dr. Viktorija Kurienė

Dr. Viktorija Kurienė is a historian. In 2022, she obtained her Ph.D. in history from Vilnius University (her thesis was on heritage protection in interwar voivodships of Vilnius and Novogrudok). Her areas of interest are history of Vilnius, history of mid-19th and 20th century Europe, and heritage studies. She worked in heritage field, listing architecture and urbanistic scale objects. Currently, she has been working at the National Library of Lithuania in documentary heritage field.

Dr. Tomas Petreikis

Dr. Tomas Petreikis is a chief bibliographer-researcher at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania and Assoc. Professor of the Faculty of Communication of Vilnius University.

Dr. Stsiapan Stureika

Dr. Stsiapan Stureika is a historian-ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, full-time Assoc. Professor at European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) (teaches courses related to heritage theory, cultural anthropology and international tourism) and chair of Belarusian committee of ICOMOS. His research interests include theory of heritage, architectural preservation, new museology, theory of nationalism, history of Belarus, international migration, and ethnic conflicts.

Dr. Saulė Jokūbauskienė

Dr. Saulė Jokūbauskienė is an assistant at Vilnius University, the Faculty of Communication, and a member of the Faculty Council. Her areas of scientific interest include knowledge management, competencies, organizational behavior, and learning organization. She defended her dissertation “Formation of Strategic Leadership Competencies of Information and Communication Specialists in a Learning Organization” at Vilnius University in 2013.

Dr. Daiva Siudikienė

Dr. Daiva Siudikienė is an associate professor at Vilnius University, Faculty of Communication, she sits on editorial board of the academic journal Information & Media (Vilnius University). Her research focuses on the strategic communication and media audience research (selectivity in media consumption, various concepts of reception studies, the relations between public discourse and popular culture, and the everyday uses of media). In 2013, she has defended her dissertation “The Impact of Lifestyle on Leisure Media Usage of the Audience” at Vilnius University.

Dr. Siarhei Liubimau

Dr. Siarhei Liubimau is a co-founder and head of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism (2007) and associate professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the European Humanities University in Vilnius (2014). For his doctoral research, he worked with the issue of trans-border urbanism and studied changes of EU internal and external border regimes as urban scale specific processes. Empirically, he worked on towns on the German-Polish and Polish-Belarusian borders (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Science, 2005-2010), as well as with the borders of Luxembourg (Bauhaus-Dessau Kolleg ‘EU Urbanism,’ 2006-2007). From 2015, he has been engaged in the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism in various research, educational and soft planning projects in the former ‘nuclear’ town of Visaginas in Eastern Lithuania. Together with Benjamin Cope, he has edited a book Re-Tooling Knowledge Infrastructures in a Nuclear Town (2021), documenting LCU work in Visaginas in 2016-2020. From 2018, he is part of CityIndustries research network. He has been a fellow at the Central European University (Budapest), the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna) and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Assoc. Prof. Salvijus Kulevičius

Assoc. Prof. Salvijus Kulevičius is a vice-dean of the Faculty of History of Vilnius University. His research interests include theory of cultural heritage, history of heritage protection, and cultural heritage and memory.

Rugilė Puodžiūnienė

Rugilė Puodžiūnienė is a cultural heritage specialist, coordinator of the Management Plan development process and a Ph.D. student at Vilnius University, Faculty of History.

Dr. Rasa Čepaitienė

Dr. Rasa Čepaitienė is a senior research fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History, Professor at the European Humanities University. She is the author and editor of eight monographs and collective monographs. Her academic interests include cultural heritage theory, collective memory studies, politics of history, urban studies, Soviet history and post-Soviet transformations.

Dr. Rasa Antanavičiūtė

Dr. Rasa Antanavičiūtė is an art historian, currently, the director of the Vilnius Museum. Her research interests include the relationship between politics and history, art in public spaces and the construction of identity. She examines how the identities of a city and its residents are (re)created and their memory (re)shaped by artistic means in order to achieve political goals. Antanavičiūtė explored these themes in the monograph Menas ir politika Vilniaus viešosiose erdvėse (Art and Politics in the Public Spaces of Vilnius), published in 2019, for which she was awarded the Vilnius Club Prize. Antanavičiūtė was the head of the Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts for nine years, since its foundation in 2011. She is also the initiator of the establishment of the Vilnius Museum and has been a curator of contemporary art exhibitions and projects. In 2020, Antanavičiūtė was awarded the Government Prize for Culture and Art.

Dr. Ramunė Čičirkaitė

Dr. Ramunė Čičirkaitė is a sociolinguist, researcher at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, and communication project manager at Žinių Radijas. Her research interests include ​Vilnius speech, media language, language variation, language attitudes, and standardization ideologies.

Dr. Margarita Matulytė

Dr. Margarita Matulytė is a cultural researcher, photography historian and senior researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. She is the author of monographs, Creating Altreality: The Sovietization of Lithuanian Photography (2021), Camera obscura: Lietuvos fotografijos istorija 1839–1945 (Camera Obscura: The History of Lithuanian Photography 1839-1945; co-author Agnė Narušytė, 2016), Nihil obstat: Lietuvos fotografija sovietmečiu (Nihil Obstat: Lithuanian Photography in the Soviet Era, 2011), author-editor of retrospectives on the work of Vitas Luckus, Antanas Sutkus, Algirdas Šeškus, Adauktas Marcinkevičius and other publications on photography and cultural heritage. She is the winner of the Government Prize for Culture and Art (2014), a recipient of the International Photography Festival Rencontres d’Arles Award for the best historical photography book of the year (2015), the Lithuanian Photographers Association Prize for significant professional dissemination of Lithuanian photography to the Lithuanian and foreign audiences and long-standing contribution to historical research (2019).

Dr. Lara Lempert

Dr. Lara Lempert is the head of the Judaica Research Center at the Documentary Heritage Department in the National Library of Lithuania and the curator of its Judaica collection. Her field of expertise is the cultural history of the European and Lithuanian Jewry. She is the author of numerous articles, editor of several books, curator of exhibitions, participant and organizer of Lithuanian and international cultural and academic events.

Krzysztof Czyżewski

Krzysztof Czyżewski is the founder and president of the Borderland Foundation in Poland. His early experience as an alternative theatre artist led him to develop a concept of cultural animation that would promote and develop the unique experience of multicultural border regions. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Borderland Foundation has been advocating broad and multidisciplinary intercultural activities. The Foundation and Czyżewski have received numerous awards from Polish and foreign institutions and organizations for their activities aimed at promoting dialogue between cultures and peoples. Czyżewski is also a poet and essayist, and the author of numerous articles on heritage and the potential for dialogue.

Karolina Bukovskytė

Karolina Bukovskytė is a Ph.D. student at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and a researcher at the National Museum of Lithuania. In 2022, her article “The Silver Frame of the Acheiropoieton of Vilnius: A Décor or a Commentary?” was published in a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary periodical journal Art History Studies. Her current research interests include religious artwork stored in museums and contentious heritage issues.

Prof. dr. Juozas Skirius

Prof. Juozas Skirius is a researcher at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania and Professor at Vytautas Magnus University. He is the author and (or) compiler of the books on Lithuanian transatlantic diplomacy in 1918-1929, U.S. Government’s policy towards Lithuania in 1920-1922, Lithuanian Government’s relations with Lithuanian Americans in 1926-1940, Lithuanian-American efforts to help Lithuania in 1918-2018 and others.

Prof. Jolanta Zabarskaitė

Prof. Jolanta Zabarskaitė is a linguist interested in semantics, linguistic expression of narratives, language performativity, and natural language processes. She has published monographs, scientific sources and academic articles. In addition to her academic activities, she also focuses on making science popular. She is the author of an interactive museum, scripts for film and TV, exhibitions. Zabarskaitė hosts talk shows about language and linguists and shares her knowledge and experience by teaching students, running seminars for teachers and professionals in various fields.

Dr. Ingrida Veliutė

Dr. Ingrida Veliutė is a Deputy Director General for Science and Strategic Development at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. She contributed to the implementation of the project “Modernization of the Cultural Education System,” lectured at various Lithuanian universities.

Her research interests include cultural policy, management of memory institutions and cooperation in the fields of culture, education and science, innovations in the cultural sector, and actualization of the impact of cultural education. During her tenure as Deputy Minister of Culture, she was in charge of the working group for the development of the Concept and Action Plan for the Preservation and Actualization of Cultural Heritage.

Dr. Inga Leonavičiūtė

Dr. Inga Leonavičiūtė is a researcher at the Faculty of History of Vilnius University. Her research interests include source studies and publication of sources; medieval history; St. Bruno of Querfurt and his mission of 1009; documentary heritage; the history of Vilnius University and Stephen Bathory University.

Dr. Habil. Henryka Ilgiewicz

Dr. Habil. Henryka Ilgiewicz is a senior researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. She has published five monographs, about a hundred articles in Lithuanian and Polish academic publications. Her research interests include history of Lithuanian science and culture and history of Vilnius scientific institutions and societies.

Assoc. Dr. Gitana Vanagaitė

Assoc. Dr. Gitana Vanagaitė is a senior research fellow at the Modern Literature Department of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Assoc. Professor at the Department of Lithuanian Studies of Vytautas Magnus University. Her research interests include autobiography and autobiographical studies, modern Lithuanian and Italian literature, narratology, and hermeneutical studies.

Dr. Donata Mitaitė

Dr. Donata Mitaitė is a senior researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in Vilnius. She is the author of a monograph analyzing the biography and poetry of Tomas Venclova, has written over one hundred articles and reviews for academic and cultural press. Mitaitė has translated works by Mikhail Bakhtin, Aaron Gurevich and Yury Lotman, compiled several books (memoirs, collections of academic articles, and others).

Darius Pocevičius

Darius Pocevičius is a writer, member of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union, and researcher of Vilnius. He is the author of the trilogy on historical relics of Vilnius (2022), the winner of the Literature and Art Prize for his excursions and tours of Vilnius (2016), recipient of the Vilnius Mayor’s Prize for the book 100 Historical Relics of Vilnius (2017), the on-line news portal 15min.lt statuette “Plunksna” for his research on the history of Vilnius (2018), and the Vilnius Club Prize for the aforementioned trilogy on historical relics of Vilnius (2023).

Dr. Andrea Griffante

Dr. Andrea Griffante is a senior research fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History. He received his MA at the University of Trieste and his Ph.D. in history at Klaipėda University in 2011. After graduating, he worked at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. From 2016-2018, he was the Gerda Henkel-Stiftung research fellow at the University of Padua. His latest monograph Children, Poverty, and Nationalism in Lithuania, 1900-1940 (Palgrave) was published in 2019. His research fields include history of humanitarianism, nation-building, history of childhood, and social history of medicine.

Asta Plechavičiūtė

Asta Plechavičiūtė is a writer, essayist, and children’s literature researcher. In 2001, she graduated from Vilnius University with an MA in Lithuanian literature and defended her final thesis on Salomėja Nėris’ tales (advisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kęstutis Urba). Currently, she has been conducting a research on Vilnius in children’s and teenagers’ literature.