by Amanda Swain When I arrived in Lithuania in January 2009 for an eight month research trip, I did not imagine that I would spend 20 out of the next 36 months living in Vilnius and Kaunas. My purpose was to gather archival documents for my dissertation concerning two days of popular unrest that followed

by Natalia Martínez-Paz Naida began crying half way through her story. She was explaining how she had been forced from her home at gunpoint, the transient life that followed, the unstable postwar existence and now the return home. Searching for stability after a decade of uncertainty, Naida had come back to her home, a mid-sized

by Eric Damiana At the beginning of September, a group of eight students and one UW professor descended on Prague, Czech Republic. We stayed for three weeks, taking intensive language courses and enjoying daily cultural and academic excursions in and around Prague. The first few days were, as with any trip abroad, exhausting and trying,

By Laura A. Dean Čaka iela, a main street running through the Latvian capital of Riga, was named for the famous Latvian writer Aleksanders Čaks, but in the post-communist period it has become synonymous with something more sinister. I first crossed this street in 1999, while studying abroad at the University of Latvia through my