BALSSI 2011 Events

Aiste Zalepuga

About the speaker: Aiste Zalepuga is currently a senior in high school at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal School in Bradenton, Florida. Growing up as an American Lithuanian, she was born in Chicago and has spent her summers in Lithuania. Wanting to learn more about her Lithuanian heritage and recognizing that the past half century has been a remarkable era in Lithuanian history, Aiste set out to preserve the stories of the events which made this time so exceptional.

Andris Straumanis

About the speaker: Andris Straumanis has a professional background in print and online journalism. His research interests include the history of the pre-war Latvian immigrant press in America, as well as the development of the Latvian media after the renewal of independence in 1991.

Kristine Motivane

About the speaker: Kristine Motivane is a visiting lecturer at the University of Washington, where she is teaching Latvian as a foreign language. She also teaches Latvian language in the Seattle Latvian School and participates in the American Latvian Association (ALA). Before coming to the US, Kristine researched sociolinguistic aspects of Latvian and also studied the implementation of the national language policy while working at the Latvian Language Agency. Previously, she taught Latvian language and literature to students in Latvia.

Daiva Markelis

About the lecture: Daiva Markelis will be reading from her recently published memoir, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life. She will also gladly answer questions about memoir writing (included getting started and finding a publisher), the immigrant experience, and growing up Baltic.

About the speaker: Daiva Markelis is a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, where she teaches creative writing, composition and rhetoric, women’s memoir, and myth and culture. Daiva received her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her master’s degree is in English with a specialization in creative writing, also from UIC. Daiva’s short stories have been published in Cream City Review and Other Voices. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, The Chicago Reader, Crab Orchard Review, Writing on the Edge, Women and Language, Mattoid, Agora, and Fourth River. Her essay, “The Lithuanian Dictionary of Depression,” was a finalist in the American Literary Review competition in Creative Nonfiction; the ALR published the essay in its Summer 2010 issue. Her memoir, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life, has recently been published by the University of Chicago Press.

Robert Kaiser

About the speaker: Robert Kaiser received a PhD in geography from Columbia University in 1988.  He joined the UW-Madison Geography Department in 1996 and is currently chair of the Geography Department.  He has served as director of CREECA at UW-Madison.

Robert Kaiser has published two books: The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton UP, 1994) and The Russians as the New Minority. Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States (Westview Press, 1996). He has also published over two dozen articles and book chapters, and is currently in the midst of a series of articles on the political and cultural geographies of the Estonian-Russian borderlands. 

He has conducted research in the areas of Narva – Ivangorod and Setomaa for the past 10 years, and is currently researching how the Bronze Night events in Tallinn (Russian riots over the removal of a WW II monument by state officials) have transformed inter-ethnic and interstate relations there since April 2007. His most recent research coming out of this project is the subject of cyberwar, which he’ll be speaking about in his "Estonia and Cyberwar" lecture.

Daniel Burghart

About the speaker: Dr. Daniel L Burghart is a Professor of National Security and Eurasian Studies at the National Defense Intelligence College in Washington DC. A specialist in Russian, CIS and Central European Affairs, he entered the Army in 1973 as a distinguished military graduate of the University of Illinois, and served in a variety of Foreign Area Officer assignments before retiring as a Colonel with 30 years of service in June 2003. Prior to coming to NDIC, Dr. Burghart taught and was a research fellow at the National Defense University. He has also has served as Senior National Security Policy Advisor at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, U S. Defense and Army Attaché to Kazakhstan, and a Mission Commander at the On Site Inspection Agency, where he led arms control inspections to the republics of the Former Soviet Union. Other assignments include: Senior Russian Military Analyst and Eurasian Branch Chief on the Army Staff, Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the Military Academy at West Point, and Director of Area Studies at the U. S. Army Russian Institute. Dr. Burghart has a BA in Political Science from Illinois, a Masters in Political Science and Graduate Certificate in Russian Area Studies from University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in Russian and International Studies from the University of Surrey. Along with articles in defense and civilian journals, he is the author of the book Red Microchip: Technology Transfer, Export Control and Economic Restructuring in the Soviet Union, and co-editor with Dr. Theresa Sabonis-Helf of In the Tracks of Tamerlane: Central Asia’s Path to the 21st Century.

Nijole Etzwiler

About the speaker: Nijole is the director of Žaibas Lithuanian Dancers. Žaibas Lithuanian Dancers perform at folk fairs, school programs, dance festivals and other cultural events. As a Madison Vilnius Sister Cities' project, Žaibas works to share, preserve, and promote Lithuanian heritage.

Žaibas was founded in 1991, in Madison, Wisconsin, by Vida Kazlauskaite Stark. Our purpose was to preserve Lithuanian culture, particularly folk dance, within the small Lithuanian community in South Central Wisconsin, and to make that culture known to the residents of Madison, the Sister City of Vilnius. Žaibas premiered at the Madison International Folk Festival, and has continued to dance annually at that event and other ethnic fairs and festivals throughout the Madison area. Together with other Lithuanian dance groups, Žaibas has participated in Lithuanian dance festivals in Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Argentina, and was chosen to represent Wisconsin at a cultural festival in its Sister State of Chiba, Japan .

For over 13 years, Asta Sepetys was the guiding spirit of our dance group. When she retired, Nijole Semenaite Etzwiler became the director and teacher. In 2009, a children's group named Zaibutis, "Little Lightning", was formed, with most of the dancers coming from Baraboo, WI. They perform with the adult dancers at every Madison International Folk Festival. In 2010, two of the little girls were featured on the Festival's posters, brochures and webpage.

Funded by Madison-Vilnius Sister Cities, and loyally supported by Madison's small Lithuanian community, Žaibas participates in all of MVSC activities, such as the Vasario 16 Lithuanian Independence Day Commemorations, picnics, and Christmas parties. In addition to its annual performance at Madison's International Festival, Žaibas appears at other ethnic and cultural fairs, staffs information tables, and gives demonstrations, talks and slide shows to organizations and schools.

For more about Žaibas Lithuanian Dancers, check out their web site here: http://madisonvilnius.org/zaibas/index.html

Jeffers Engelhardt

About the speaker: Jeffers Engelhardt is an ethnomusicologist whose research deals with music and religion (particularly Orthodox Christianity), the musics of postsocialist Eurasia (particularly Estonia), and music, human rights, and cultural rights (particularly in East Africa). Currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College, he is completing a book-length ethnography titled Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and the Secular Modern in Estonia. His articles and reviews have been published in Ethnomusicology, Journal of Baltic Studies, Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, as well as chapters in several edited volumes. He is co-editor of Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and is also at work on a project that explores musicians, social entrepreneurship, and peer-to-peer/web2.0 microfinance participation in Kenya and elsewhere. Jeffers holds a BM in Piano from the Oberlin Conservatory (1998) and an MA (2000) and PhD (2005) in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago.

Nancy Heingartner

About the speaker: Nancy Heingartner's background is in Russian language instruction, though she has also done stints in government service, study abroad, and community outreach. She has been outreach coordinator for UW-Madison's Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia since 2007. She is also the program administrator for UW-Madison's Baltic Studies Summer Institute and for the Central Eurasian Studies Summer Institute.