Ms. Justina Smalkyte

Professional Background

Justina Smalkyte is a PhD candidate at the Sciences Po Center for History in Paris, where her primary research areas include mass violence and the Holocaust, material culture studies, war and gender, and Eastern European studies. Her dissertation examines anti-Nazi resistance movements in German-occupied Lithuania (1941-1944). Prior to her doctoral studies, Ms. Smalkyte earned two master's degrees in history, one from Université Paris Cité and another from the Humboldt University of Berlin, and a bachelor's in history from Vilnius University. 

Ms. Smalkyte was recently a Saul Kagan Claims Conference Fellow (2023–2024) and has received numerous other awards from prestigious organizations, including 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. Most recently, she served as a guest editor for the special issue "Gender and Materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century" at Connexe (University of Geneva, 2023). She has published book chapters on inter-ethnic violence in German-occupied Lithuania, post-1990 memory politics, and the materiality of Jewish antifascist resistance.

Fellowship Research

Justina Smalkyte was awarded the Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellowship for her research project, “‘Thick Sociability’ in German-occupied Vilnius.” Her project explores the denunciations of Jews and anti-Jewish violence during the first six months of the German occupation of Lithuania. In particular, her work focuses on a certain “thick sociability” in Vilnius, defined as the geographical and often social proximity among the perpetrators, victims, and witnesses of the Holocaust. This concept, together with GIS-science and microhistory methodologies, allows for a thorough examination of the agency and survival strategies of Vilnius Jews as well as the responses of the local Polish, Lithuanian, and Belarusian populations of the city during the pivotal early months of the occupation, marked by the creation of the Vilnius ghetto in September 1941 and the systematic mass killings in Ponary during the summer and fall of the same year.

This fellowship allows Ms. Smalkyte access to documentation within the USHMM archives, which hold important collections from Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, and Russian archives, along with oral and written testimonies of Holocaust survivors. 

Residency Period: January 1, 2025–August 31, 2025