News

On Tuesday, April 11, 4pm: Jolanta Mickute will talk on "On Polish Zionism and Its Women, or How Traditional "Jewish Daughters" Turned Pioneer (1918-1939)"

On Tuesday, April 18, 4pm: Vaidotas Vaicaitis will talk on "The Concept of Constitutionalism in Contemporary Lithuania"

Both lectures will take place at  Luce Hall, Rm 203, 34 Hillhouse Ave., Yale

Jolanta Mickute is Assistant Professor of History at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.  Her research examines political and cultural issues in the interwar period in Central and Eastern Europe.  Her current work focuses on the experience of Jewish women in interwar Poland, including Vilnius and the surrounding region.  She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University, and holds master’s degrees from Oxford University and Vilnius University.  She has held research fellowships in a number of countries, including Poland, Israel, Germany, and the United States.  Her work has appeared in East European Politics and Society, Jewish Social Studies, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, and other publications.            

At Yale Professor Mickute is working on several projects, including a book on the Jewish community in interwar Poland and an article on the meanings of Vilne/Wilno/Vilnius for Jews, Wilna-born Poles, and Lithuanians in Kaunas, the capital of interwar Lithuania.  Her book project, titled “Modern, Zionist, Feminist: The Politics of Culture, Ethnicity, and Gender in Interwar Poland, 1918-1939,” analyzes how Jewish women – fractured along class and generational lines – contended with their double marginality through political activism, social work, education, and work in the home.  She explores how limits established by tradition, ethnicity, class, locale, and gender shaped Polish Jewish women’s identities during the 1920s and 1930s, but also shows that operating from the margins opened up space for activism.

Professor Mickute is also academic director at Ethnic Kitchen (Pasaulio virtuvė) in Lithuania, a non-profit organization that supports art projects and cultural intelligence enhancement training to strengthen integrated, civil society in Lithuania.  She is also part of a project to make a documentary on Holocaust remembrance in post-1991 independent Lithuania.  

Vaidotas Vaičaitis is Associate Professor of Law at Vilnius University. He received a master’s degree in Legal Theory from the European Academy of Legal Theory (Brussels) in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Law from Vilnius University in 2001.  He also holds graduate degrees in Religious Studies and History from Vilnius University. His particular interests are in Lithuanian and comparative constitutional law.  He is the editor of Lietuvos konstitucionalizmo istorija [History of Lithuanian constitutionalism] (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2016).

At Yale Professor Vaičaitis is furthering his research on the principles of the rule of law, democracy, and the protection of human rights as values of modern constitutionalism. He has written on these concepts as reflected in the history of law in Lithuania. As Lithuania is a member of the European Union (since 2004), these principles now must be implemented within a broader European context. The study of Lithuanian constitutional law thus needs reconsideration given the complexities resulting from a tradition of national legal order that now exists within processes of European integration. Professor Vaičaitis is also studying the history of US constitutional law, including case law of the US Supreme Court, as comparisons to aid in developing Lithuanian and European constitutionalism.

Professor Vaičaitis is active in international scholarly societies, including the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and the International Association of Constitutional Law.  Together with some of his students at Vilnius University, he reestablished in 2014 the law fraternity Iustitia as a Catholic association fostering civic and religious values in Lithuania based on social justice and human dignity.