Guest Lecture | Gintarė Malinauskaitė (Vilnius) Transatlantic Childhood: Children’s Mobility, Nation-State Building, and Lithuanian Migration in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries

IOS and the Leibniz ScienceCampus are pleased to invite you to a guest lecture by Dr Gintarė Malinauskaitė, Researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History, Vilnius, and visiting researcher at IOS from March 2025.

Abstract | The presentation explores the little-known history of Lithuanian immigrant children in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1868 and 1914, approximately 500,000 Lithuanians left the Russian Empire for the United States, fleeing poverty, social, and political unrest. This migration has attracted a considerable amount of scholarly research among scholars, but it has focused primarily on the migratory experiences of adults. This lecture begins by locating Lithuanian children within the history of the transatlantic migration. It then examines how children in American exile became “a national property” and were transformed into the objects of ethnic conflict both by members of the Lithuanian national movement in exile and in Lithuania. Finally, by exploring the issues of return migration and national loyalties, the presentation discusses the transatlantic legacies of this children mobility. The lecture seeks to show how the categories of childhood, nation-building, and migration were intertwined in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Gintarė Malinauskaitė completed her PhD in history at the Humboldt University in Berlin with a dissertation on Mediated Memories: Holocaust Narratives and Iconographies in Lithuania, which was published as a monograph with the Herder Institut, Marburg, in 2019. Her most recent book,  The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials in the Cold War Context: The 1964 Klaipėda War Crimes Trial, was published by Routledge in 2024. From 2017 to 2022, she worked as a researcher at the Vilnius branch of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Since 2023, she has been a researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History. Her research covers the history of Lithuania in the 19th and 20th centuries.