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Mindaugas Šapoka is Researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History.  He is a historian of early modern Eastern and Central Europe, especially Poland and Lithuania.  His book Warfare, Loyalty and Rebellion: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Great Northern War, was published by Routledge in 2018.  He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Aberdeen in 2015 after having completed master’s and bachelor’s degrees in History at Vilnius University in 2009 and 2007.  From 2015 to 2016 he held a Jacobite Trust Studies Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

At Yale Dr. Šapoka is working on a book project titled “The Great Northern War, 1700-1721: the war which shaped Europe.” When completed, the book will be the first synthetic assessment of the war in any language.  In this war, of key significance in the history of early-modern Europe, the supremacy of Sweden in the Baltic region was challenged by Russia, Denmark, Poland-Lithuania, and the German states of Saxony, Prussia, and Hanover.  Dr. Šapoka emphasizes the crucial role of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the war, which marks the decline of Sweden as a major power and the rise of Russia’s military, political and cultural hegemony in eastern and northern Europe.

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 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). As part of this work she co-authored the section on Lithuania in the study Honoring Civil Courage: Developing Suggestions to Improve the Situation of Victims of Communist State Crimes. Dr. Kareniauskaitė also currently heads a research project at Vytautas Magnus University dedicated to gender-based violence in twentieth-century Lithuania.

Dr. Kareniauskaitė is co-author and co-editor of the book Anti-Communist Opposition in Poland and Lithuania – a Similar, Common, or Parallel Phenomenon? (Vilnius, 2015). Some of her most recent works appears in the article “Gulag Prisoners, Deportees and Their Family Members in the Lithuanian SSR Under and After Stalinism: Legal, Ideological and Social Definitions,” published in Histories (Un)Spoken. Strategies of Survival and Social-Professional Integration in Political Prisoners’ Families in Communist Central and Eastern Europe in the ’50s and ’60s (Münster, 2017).