Dr. Daina Eglitis

Professional Background

Daina Eglitis is associate professor of sociology and international affairs at George Washington University.  She received an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  Professor Eglitis possesses skills in English, Latvian, and Russian.  While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Professor Eglitis conducted research on her project “An Unlikely Refuge: Jewish and Latvian Women Volunteers in the Red Army in World War II.”

Professor Eglitis has written a number of publications, including: “Holocaust Commemoration in Romania: Roma and the Contested Politics of Memory and Memorialization,” Journal of Genocide Research (Routledge 2014), coauthored with Michelle Kelso; Discover Sociology (Sage 2014), a textbook coauthored with William Chambliss; and Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity and Revolution in Latvia (Pennsylvania State University Press 2005).  Her presentations include History and Collective Memory in the Baltic Countries, Armenian Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography in Yerevan, Armenia, March 2013, and Remembering and Forgetting in the Latvian Post-Communist Historical Narrative: The Case of Latvian Women Volunteers of the Red Army, Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Conference at the University of Illinois-Chicago, April 2012.

Fellowship Research

For her fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Professor Eglitis used documents pertaining to partisan activities in the Latvian region, Soviet newsreels featuring women partisans, and oral histories from the Latvian Documentation Project to create a detailed case-study of Latvian and Jewish women volunteers in the Red Army during World War II.

Professor Daina Eglitis was in residence at the Mandel Center from January 1 to May 31, 2015.