Justina Smalkyte

Justina Smalkyte is a Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow in Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (2025) and an Affiliated Researcher to the Centre for History of Sciences Po Paris. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Sciences Po Paris and a double M.A. in History from Université Paris Cité (formerly Paris Diderot University) and Humboldt University of Berlin.

Her doctoral dissertation, Spaces, Objects, Bodies: A Material History of Anti-Nazi Resistance in German-Occupied Lithuania, 1941–1944, supervised by Claire Andrieu and Elissa Mailänder, examined how various places and objects—including hiding places, neighborhoods, villages, and forests, as well as material items such as boots, coats, and watches—became constitutive elements of social practices of resistance and repression in German-occupied Lithuania.

Dr. Smalkyte has published on the Holocaust and interethnic violence in German-occupied Lithuanian territories as well as post-1990 memory politics in Lithuania. She also served as a guest co-editor for a special issue of the journal Connexe (University of Geneva), titled Gender and Materiality in Central-Eastern Europe in the 20th Century. Her research has been supported by grants from the Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies, the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah in France, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, and the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union at Yad Vashem.

Publications

• “Antisemitism, Post-Fascism and Selective Remembering of the Past: A Case Study of Far-right Memory Discourses in post-1990 Lithuania”, in On the Digital Front-Line: Far-Right Memory Work in Baltic, Central, and East European Online Spaces, Andrej Kotljarchuk &Francesco Zavatti (eds.), Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2023, ISBN: 978-91-984509-7-2.
• “Materiality, Gender, and Ethnicity in Jewish Anti-Nazi Resistance in German-occupied Lithuania,” in Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities History and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe, Anders Ahlbäck & Kasper Braskén (eds.), Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right, New York: Routledge, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003393450.
• “Gender, Ethnicity, and Multidirectional Violence in the Last Months of the German Rule in Lithuania: A Case Study of Local Force Battalions”, Reshaping the Nation: Collective Identities and Post-War Violence in Europe 1944–48, Ota Konrád, Boris Barth, Jaromír Mrňka, & Blanka Mouralová (eds.), World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence Series, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78386- 0_3.

Review Direction

Anna Sidorevich, Justina Smalkyte & Iva Jelušić (eds.), "Gender and Materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the XX century", Connexe. Exploring Post-Communist Spaces, Vol. 9, 2023. https://oap.unige.ch/journals/connexe/issue/view/80.

Claire Andrieu and Elissa Mailänder (Sciences Po, CHSP)
Espace, objets, corps : Les matérialités des résistances anti-nazies en Lituanie sous occupation allemande (1941-1944)