Justina Smalkyté is a PhD candidate at the Sciences Po Center for History in Paris where she is preparing a dissertation on anti-Nazi resistance movements in German-occupied Lithuania (1941-1944). She holds a double MA in European History from Université Paris Cité and Humboldt University of Berlin and a BA in History from Vilnius University.
Her doctoral research examines anti-Nazi resistance through the lens of material culture: while focusing on a wide range of material objects used by resistance members her thesis attempts to shed a new light on practices of resistance and violence in Lithuania under German occupation. Focusing on the Generalbezirk Litauen which was administered under the Reichskomissariat Ostland, her study departs from the existing historiography on resistance in German-occupied Eastern Europe by examining the entanglements of four underground movements: Jewish resistance in the ghettos and partisan camps, Communist partisans, Polish Armia Krajowa soldiers, and Lithuanian nationalist resistance.
Smalkyté’s research has been supported by research grants of 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 in Israel.
She published a book chapter “Gender, Ethnicity, and Multidirectional Violence in the Last Months of the German Rule in Lithuania: A Case Study of Local Force Battalions” in Reshaping the Nation: Collective Identities and Post-War Violence in Europe 1944–48 (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2022), and her publication “Politics of Selective Remembering in Post-1990 Lithuania: A Case study of Lithuanian Post-Fascist Far-Right Mnemonic discourse” will appear in the conference volume Far Right Memory Politics in the Internet Era (Södertörn Academic Studies, Sweden).