Contributors
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Jordi Arrufat is an advisor on public affairs, digital communications and international relations who enjoys writing about food and travel in his spare time. He graduated with a degree in political science from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. In spring 2018, he walked the entire length of the 1989 Baltic Way from Tallinn to Vilnius in 31 days.
Sintija Augustova is a student at the University of Latvia, currently working on her bachelor’s in Communication. She has an interest in Latgalian culture and language, creating content in Latgalian for the website lakuga.lv and radio broadcast 5Breinumi.
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Uldis Balodis is a linguist and freelance translator. He spent 2013-2016 studying the Lutsi Estonians as a Kone Foundation postdoctoral fellow. He specializes in the study of the languages of the Baltic region and the southwestern United States.
Tom Benjamin is an architecture photographer based in Portsmouth, England. His focus is often Brutalism which he posts on his website ourshadowswillremain.com
Lelde Beņķe is a writer and content producer with a focus on stories from and about Latvia. She runs LifeinRiga.com – a hybrid of an expat blog and guide book.
Liana Ivete Benke is a contributing writer for FvF. She lives in Riga, Latvia.
Jonathan Bousfield is a writer specialising in travel, culture and history in Central and Eastern Europe. Currently living in Zagreb, he is the author of Rough Guides to the Baltic States, Croatia and Poland. More of his writing can be seen at www.straysatellite.com.
Viktors Buda was the chief editor of the first Baltic dance music magazine, Flash. In the mid-2000s he was also well known as one of the leading promoters in Riga. Since 2009, he has been working with leading electronic music names in the dance music capital, Ibiza. His works have been published in major international dance music magazines such as DJ Mag, Dub Ibiza, Life Guide, Ibiza.ru, and others. Viktors is an editor and one of the founders of the new media platform, Ibiza Life, a magazine dedicated to Ibiza cultural life.
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Helmuts Caune holds a master’s degree in philosophy and currently works as an editor and contributor to the online art magazine Arterritory.com. Other than that, he enjoys chess, watching birds and bad movies and indulging in various pleasures of city life.
Damiano Cerrone is an urbanist, project researcher at Tampere University of Technology and Daniel Giovannini is a physicist, post-doc at the University of Toronto. Together with Prof. Panu Lehtovuori and Katherine Cramer, they are the core team of SPIN Unit, a a transnational consultancy group combining art and science to hack the invisible form of the city.
Barbara Chepaitis is the author of seven published novels in both sci-fi and mainstream. You can buy her book The Amber here.
Geoff Chester is a history buff and a proud resident of Liepāja. He is also founder of Novus Novuss, and owner of the first Open Office/Novuss game hall in Liepāja, at Teodora Breikša iela 47.
Mike Collier is a British writer and journalist, who has lived in Latvia since 2007. He has travelled widely in Central and Eastern Europe, once had to escape from an Italian castle by climbing down the walls at midnight and enjoyed a brief stint as an honorary member of the Bulgarian Navy.
Erin Crouch lives in Tacoma, Washington and Tallinn, Estonia. She likes Estonian animation so much that she went on tour with it.
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Solveiga Daugirdaitė (PhD) is a literary scholar from the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Foklore, Vilnius.
Margaret Drummond grew up in a Dutch/Lithuanian family and now lives in London. She studied modern languages at university, taught for many years and now translates.
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George East emigrated to Lithuania on a whim in 2015 and still hasn’t left. Until recently, he worked as a journalist, until he decided to sell out and begin working for Vilnius Municipality.
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Elmar Gams is a MA history student at Tallinn University. He is interested in the relationship of history and memory in the Baltics (especially in Lithuania). His current aims are to complete his thesis and to dig deeper to find more commonalities between Eesti, Latvija and Lietuva.
Stuart Garlick is an English journalist who lives in Tallinn, Estonia. He writes the website Charmoffensive.ee, and contributes to Agence France Presse and a number of publications in the Baltic region.
Adam Garrie teaches modern history at King’s College London and is currently engaged in PhD level research in 20th century political history. He is a classically trained musician and enjoys writing about all styles of music, world politics and just about anything to do with Estonia.
Lars Marius Garshol is a software engineer living in Oslo, Norway. His hobby is researching farmhouse ale brewing, which has so far resulted in two books, and a number of posts on his blog.
Marita Gasteiger is a graduate student of Interdisciplinary Eastern European Studies at the University of Vienna. After several study visits to Minsk and Moscow, she is currently doing an abroad semester at Vilnius University. Gasteiger works as a freelance journalist for the Austrian Augustin street magazine and has been politically active in the Austrian Students’ Union.
Dr. Catherine Gibson is a Mobilitas Plus research fellow at the University of Tartu in the School of Theology and Religious Studies. She is the recipient of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies’ 2019-20 Emerging Scholar award and is currently writing a book on the history of ethnographic mapping in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire.
Emily Gilbert did her PhD about Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian European Volunteer Workers in Britain in the mid 1990s at the University of Sheffield, and after a nearly twenty -year gap decided to publish it a a book. Rebuilding Post-War Britain: Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian Refugees in Great Britain, 1946-1951 was published this year by Pen and Sword publishers. She is not Latvian, Lithuanian or Estonian herself (she is often asked) but has had a fascination with the whole Soviet Union, Russian, Baltics and East European region since being a teenager, and has travelled widely around the region.
Zané Elksnite Grants-Wolff is an art advisor and curator. She is of a younger generation than Mekas, but quite similarly her family left their home in Latvia during the Cold War; they watched the fall of the Berlin Wall from a displaced persons camp in Austria. In United States, she was one of the first to receive a degree in Baltic Area Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle, the only university in the U.S. where the languages and culture of all three Baltic countries are taught. In addition to majoring in English with emphasis on writing, she enthusiastically studied cinema and art history, becoming friends with many local artists and writers of her generation. Zané returned to Latvia on a Fulbright scholarship and later moved to Lithuania, where she lived for more than ten years prior to moving to Switzerland. Since 2013 she has been personally in touch with Jonas Mekas, exchanging letters and discussing work projects. They met during Art Basel in 2016
Samuel Gruber is an art and architectural historian, cultural heritage activist, and consultant. He writes often about Jewish cultural heritage in the Baltics where he is engaged in several projects. He was recently in Vilnius where he participated in the international conference on European Jewish Cemeteries.
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Owen Hatherley writes on architecture, culture and politics for Architectural Review, the Guardian, Jacobin and the London Review of Books, among others. He is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism (Zer0, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010) Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015), The Chaplin Machine (Pluto, 2016) and Red Metropolis (Repeater, 2020). His most recent books are a collection of essays, Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Verso 2021), and the forthcoming Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer (Penguin, 2021). He is also the editor of The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs (Open House, 2020), and the culture editor of Tribune.
Dr Siobhán Hearne is a postdoctoral researcher currently based at the University of Latvia in Riga. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2017 for a thesis on the regulation of female prostitution in the Russian Empire, 1900-1917. She has published several articles on gender and sexuality in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union.
Tharik Hussain is a British Muslim travel writer and journalist who specialises in the Muslim heritage of Europe. He has written about the Islamic history of places as diverse as Romania, Ireland and Spain. Tharik blogs as the Wandering Musulman and all of his published work can be seen on his website.
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Linus Folke Jensen writes on all things Latvian. A Danish student, he became interested in Latvian culture and language doing an exchange year in the country. He covers Latvian politics for the poll aggregator Europe Elects and has written for the Latvian public broadcaster, LSM.
Jewish Heritage Lithuania, funded by the EU, aims to promote Jewish heritage in Lithuania, create thematic and regional tourist maps, and encourage local and international tourism to Lithuania.
Kristina Jõekalda, PhD candidate, is an art historian, based in Tallinn. She has published numerous scholarly articles on architectural heritage and ideology. She is currently research coordinator of the Estonian Academy of Arts Doctoral School.
E.A. Johnson works as a volunteer at Tallinn’s Ukrainian Cultural Center. You can follow his other writing projects at flatfish.ee – new subscribers are always welcome. And if you are interested, you can find facsimile copies of the new Poetics at the Labora Shop online or in Tallinn at Vene 18.
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Wailana Kalama is a freelance travel writer from Hawaii, now based in Vilnius. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and writes mainly about history, language and cross-cultural exchanges.
Laurynas Katkus (b.1972) is a Lithuanian writer, essayist and translator. He studied Lithuanian philology and comparative literature in Vilnius, Norwich and Leipzig. He was awarded various grants and fellowships, among others, of the Iowa University International Writing Program and Stockton College. He has five translated books in English and German, most recently a novel, Schwankende Schatten, (Klak Verlag, Berlin, 2022). For more, see www.laurynaskatkus.lt
Raivo Kelomees, PhD (art history) is an artist, critic and new media researcher. He studied psychology, art history, and design in Tartu University and the Academy of Arts in Tallinn.
Judith Knott started out as a linguist, studying French, German and Russian and completing a PhD in Historical Linguistics. She then changed direction and worked for 27 years as a civil servant specialising in tax. Since retiring she has resumed her interest in languages, and last year started to learn Estonian. (She has previously written on her own blog about her initial exposure to Estonian last year and about her reasons for learning the language.)
Kirill Kobrin is a writer, historian and editor. He is the author of 30 books in Russian and English and numerous publications in the Russian, British, Latvian, Lithuanian and German press. He lives in Riga.
Saulė Kubiliūtė is a Lithuanian translator who graduated in Political Science from the Institute of International Relations and Political Science. Her BA thesis was titled “National Identity in Baltic Centenary Cinema”
Aidas Kulbokas was born in Panevėžys in 1987 and now lives in Kaunas. In 2011 he graduated from the bachelor’s study programme in Ethnology at Vytautas Magnus University; after that, he continued studying at the same university, and in 2015 graduated from the master’s study programme in Ethnology and Folklore (Comparative Cultural). Since 2011 he has worked as a museologist in the Department of Photography and Documentation at the M.K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art.
Rob Kunzig is a multimedia journalist based in Riga. You can see more of his articles, photo and video work at www.robkunzig.com.
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Rita Laima is a Latvian-American writer, translator, and artist. A mother of four children, she lives in Maryland with her partner. Her memoir of life in Soviet-occupied Latvia will be published in 2017.
Ieva Laube is an author, editor, researcher, and curator of art education projects. Currently an MA student in the Nordic Visual Studies and Art Education (NoVA) program at Aalto University in Helsinki. She has studied journalism at the University of Latvia and design research, writing and criticism at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. Until recently she worked at the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) as a researcher, editor and co-author of several artists’ books and publications, and headed the publishing processes of the biennial, as well as developing and coordinating its education program.
Margriet Lestraden is a museologist and art historian. She works for museums in developing countries, and has for a long time divided her time between the Netherlands and Latvia, working to realise a dream.
Lidija Liegis is a British-Latvian journalist based between the UK, West Africa and the Middle East. She has previously worked for the Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism (Re:Baltica), the London Bureau of Investigative Journalism and on projects for the FT and BBC.
Dr. Michael Loader is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He received his PhD in November 2015 from King’s College London with a dissertation entitled ‘The Thaw in Soviet Latvia: National Politics 1953-1959’. He is the recipient of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies’ 2017-2018 Emerging Scholar award. His current research includes projects about Soviet patronage and power relationships and the career of Politburo member Arvīds Pelše, and the changing relationship between Moscow and the Soviet periphery between 1944 and 1964.
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Marcelijus Martinaitis (1936 – 2013) was a Lithuanian poet and essayist, recipient of the Lithuanian National Prize in Literature. He was also an active participant in Lithuania’s independence movement. Martinaitis has published ten collections of poetry and three books of essays in addition to plays and screenplays. Mes gyvenome (The Way We Lived Then) has won several prestigious literary prizes, including the most creative book award issued by the Lithuanian Literature and Folklore Institute (2009), the reader’s choice award from the Book of the Year (2010), and the Žemaitės (2010) and Juozas Paukštelis (2011) awards.
Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Currently, he works as Associate Professor at Tallinn University and convenes the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (EASA Network). Francisco has published two monographs – Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects (UCL Press, 2021) and Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018).
Richard Martyn-Hemphill is an editor at the Intersection Project.
Maximilian Matthews runs the Facebook page Roaming Round Riga, which takes both a historical and contemporary view of the wonderful city that is Riga. Most of the posts are adapted from his popular topographical CD-ROM ‘Roaming Round Riga’. First published in 2005, it is is updated every year.
Will Mawhood is the editor of Deep Baltic
James McGeever has lived for 15 of the last 21 years in Kaunas, Lithuania. He writes, proofreads, teaches and works on sustainability stuff. Some of his irrelevant irregular records of travel observations, conversations and confrontations can be seen on his curtainsinkaunas blog.
Claire McGinn is a UK-based musicologist. Her research focuses on contemporary Baltic art music, and she has recently published articles in Women and Music, Lithuanian Musicology, TEMPO, and Opera magazine.
Lewis McGuffie is a British graphic designer based in Tallinn, Estonia. He works mainly with typography, lettering and traditional sign writing. His work can be found at www.lewisdoessigns.com.
Helga Merits studied philosophy in Amsterdam. She worked as a journalist for national radio and newspapers in both Belgium and the Netherlands. Kallis Paul was her first documentary film (2006), for which she received the Theodor Luts price. The Story of the Baltic University is her fourth film.
Maarja Merivoo-Parro works as executive editor at Estonia’s pre-eminent music station, Raadio 2, and also has her own show on Latvia’s Radio Naba.
Matthew Moore received a BFA in Photography from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan in 2000 and an MFA in Photography from Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia in 2009. Matthew’s work examines the contemporary landscape, with a focus on the way historical narratives are controlled through human intervention. He is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland.
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Oliver Orro is an Estonian architectural historian
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Roland Papp was born and raised in Budapest. After studying linguistics and Central and Eastern European History, he lived in Estonia. Now he is a blogger and also works for EU institutions.
Tom Peeters is a Belgian freelance journalist who divides his time between Estonia, Belgium and the wider world. He writes about the Baltics for various Flemish media, as well as on his blog in English and Dutch.
Justin Petrone is a writer and author of the new book My Viljandi: Small-Town Blues about his life in a small Northern European town. He contributes to the e-Estonia and e-Residency blogs and writes for Research in Estonia. He is also the author of the My Estonia trilogy and maintains a literary blog called North!.
Laura Plūmiņa is a graduate of the History of Art department at the Latvian Art Academy, and she specialises in the research and protection of Riga’s wooden architecture. She is also co-founder of the tourism company Travel Jam.
Kazimierz Popławski is the editor-in-chief of the website Przegląd Bałtycki. He is a graduate in International Relations from the University of Warsaw, and is interested in Estonia, the Baltic Sea region, and Central and Eastern Europe. He is an expert at Norden Centrum and also runs the website eesti.pl.
Dzmitry Pravatorau is a postgraduate student and a tutor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research interests include popular geopolitical imaginations of the Baltic States among Russian speakers, and Lithuanian studies in general.
Bart Pushaw is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Maryland. He is currently based in Tallinn, where his exhibition “Conductors of Colour: Music and Modernity in Estonian Art” is open at KUMU Art Museum until 27 August 2017.
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Darmon Richter is a writer, photographer, and author of Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide. Details of his past and current projects can be found at www.darmonrichter.com.
Anarchist historian Philip Ruff (Filips Rufs) is the author of Pa stāvu liesmu debesīs: nenotveramā latviešu anarhista Pētera Māldera laiks un dzīve (A Towering Flame – the life and times of Peter the Painter), published by Dienas Grāmata (Riga 2012). He first visited Latvia in January 1988 and lives in London.
Dace Rukšāne-Ščipčinska (born 1969) is a Latvian writer and journalist. After finishing high school, she studied Medicine and Biology and additionally participated in the SOURCES Script 2 Development Workshop in Vienna. Rukšāne became well-known in 2002 for her novel The Little Affair (Romaniņš) that touched upon the subject of female sexuality. It was followed by Bedtime Stories of Beatrice, and Why Were You Crying?, as well as several articles devoted to intimate subject matters and relationships. During the 1990s Rukšāne wrote poetry, and in the early 2000s several of her plays were staged in various theatres in Latvia. Her novels have been published in Germany and Denmark. In 2002, Rukšāne became a regular contributor to a weekly column in Sestdiena magazine. From 2004 to 2012 she was editor-in-chief of Lillit magazine.
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Born in Tallinn in 1947, Mari Saat is an Estonian economist and writer who has published four novels, plus a number of short story collections, children’s books and non-fiction works. She has received many awards since releasing her first collection of short stories (Katastroof) in 1973, including the Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Prose Award in 1992, 1999 and 2008 – the latter for The Saviour of Lasnamäe. Saat is known for her sharp social analyses and existential explorations. She teaches business ethics at Tallinn University of Technology. Her books have been translated into several languages, and The Saviour of Lasnamäe into Russian and Finnish.
Agita Salmiņa is a freelance journalist and tour guide, who is interested in the development of cities’ history, culture and art. Riga has been her home for seven years.
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley obsessively writes letters to her mother, her adult daughter, her accountant, as well as to unknown beings in outer space. Only her mother admits to reading them. Born in Heidelberg, Sylvia spent her childhood in California and now lives in Estonia. You can receive more of her stories about Estonia in your inbox by signing up to her brand new free mailing list at https://sylviawrigley.substack.com/
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Margaret Tali is a researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History and a freelance curator, whose work focuses on public memory, migration and histories of art museums. Together with Ieva Astahovska she initiated the project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” (2019-2023) in the framework of which they curated the exhibition “Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds” at the Latvian National Museum of Art and Lithuanian National Gallery of Art.
Steve Taylor is a consultant, coach and writer based in London, and a graduate student in the Architecture department at the University of East London
Sergej Timofejev was born in Riga, Latvia in 1970 into a family of Russian origin. He lives and writes in Latvia, but he writes in Russian and publishes his poems in Russian and Latvian. He see himself as a Latvian poet but has quite close connections to the modern literature world in Russia. “It’s like a cultural stereo with two channels in my head…” With his colleagues from the text-group Orbita he continues to mix modern poetry with other artforms and media, presenting it as installations, poetry pirate radio stations, etc.
Richard Thompson runs the record label Liminal Noise and plays in Lost Harbours – a free folk collective split between Latvia and England. He has been active for fifteen years as an international concert promoter (Culture as a Dare / Psykick Dancehall), cultural instigator, zine writer and musician. Originally from Southend-on-Sea, UK, he now lives in Riga, Latvia.
Liuba Timonina is a freelance writer and translator living in Riga.
Tom Tonks runs Hidden Tallinn, a blog dedicated to unearthing the secrets of Estonia and her fascinating capital city.
Lolita Tomsone is the director of the Žanis Lipke Memorial. She lived for many years in Jerusalem and has written for the magazine Rīgas Laiks. In her native Riga, she longs for Jerusalem.
Terje Toomistu (b. 1985) is an Estonian documentary filmmaker with a background in anthropology. Her work often draws from various cross-cultural processes, queer realities and cultural memory. She holds double MA degrees (cum laude) in Ethnology and in Communication Studies from the University of Tartu, where she is pursuing a PhD degree in anthropology. In 2013-2014, she was also a Fulbright fellow at UC Berkeley, U.S.A. Currently she is a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam. She co-curated a multimedia exhibition about Soviet hippies, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.
Wladyslaw Trejo is a member of the Spanish coldwave band Slovenska Televizija. You can find out more about Slovenska Televiza at their Bandcamp and Facebook page.
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Piia Veikkolainen is a travel blogger and adventurer who shares exciting and unforgettable travel experiences from around the world, near and far. Bustling cities, pristine beaches, beautiful nature, countryside charm and a lot more at Ticket To Adventures.
Vineta Vilcāne works at the non-governmental organisation LgSC (www.lgsc.lv). Her main interests are related to the revitalisation and popularisation of the Latgalian language. Vineta has a master’s degree in History.
Laima Vincė is a Lithuanian-American writer, poet, literary translator, artist, and educator. She is the recipient of two Fulbright grants in Creative Writing, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in Literature, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and other awards. She earned an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a second MFA in Nonfiction from the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of a novel, This Is Not My Sky, which was translated into Lithuanian as Tai ne mano dangus (Alma Littera), and five works of literary nonfiction, including Journey into the Backwaters of the Heart, translated in Lithuanian as Mūsų nepalaužė (Alma Littera). To learn more about Laima Vincė’s work please see her website at: www.laimavince.com
Dr. Zigmas Vitkus is a research fellow at the Institute of Baltic Region History and Archeology, University of Klaipėda (Lithuania), and a freelance columnist. He is a graduate of Vilnius University, Faculty of History and the Centre for Religious Studies and Research. His fields of interest are the politics of memory and the culture of memorials, with a focus on memorials in places of genocide. In 2019, he defended his doctoral thesis at Klaipėda University, Department of History on the topic “A Memorial in the Politics of Memory: The Case of Paneriai (1944–2016)”.
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Ines Weizman (PhD) is professor of architecture theory, director of the Bauhaus-Institute of History and Theory of Architecture and Planning and director of the Centre for Documentary Architecture at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Dr James Matthew White is a research fellow in church history at the University of Tartu. His book Unity in Faith? Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800-1918 was released by Indiana University Press in 2020. He currently specialises on the history of Orthodoxy in the Baltic region. He received the 2020 Canadian Association of Slavists Article of the Year Award for his article “Russian Orthodox Monasticism in Riga Diocese, 1881-1917”. He is the creator of www.balticorthodoxy.com, a digital resource for the history of Orthodoxy in the Baltic region.
Daryl Worthington is from London but lives in Riga, Latvia. He occasionally writes music journalism, is the editor of the website New Historian, co-runs the Bezirk tape label, and is a musician himself.
Helen Wright is Estonia editor at Deep Baltic. She has written for ERR News, The Baltic Times and Estonian World. Previously she worked at local newspapers in the UK.
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Farida Zaletilo is curator at the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils, Latvia.
Kaspars Zaltāns is a researcher at The Museum of the Barricades of 1991. He is currently working on a piece about the voluntary units who secured public order during the National Awakening.