Rustis Kamuntavicius

Member-At-Large Candidate

Rūstis Kamuntavičius (www.rustis.lt; in LT/EN) is Associate Professor of the History Department and Head of the Czesław Miłosz Center at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania). He is also Director of the Institute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (www.ldki.lt in LT/BE/PL/UA), which promotes the notion of a shared past among Lithuanians, Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians. The Institute organizes the International Congress of Belarusian Studies (www.icbs.by in LT/EN/BE), the most important independent Belarusian academic annual event usually held in Kaunas (since 2011). 

He received his MA diploma from Central European University in Budapest (Hungary) and completed his PhD studies at Vytautas Magnus University.  He conducts research, probations, and lectures in Italian, French, Swiss, Hungarian, and Polish institutes and universities.  Kamuntavičius is a member of the Board of Directors of the Club of East European Summer School (Warsaw University) that unites more than 600 researchers and intellectuals from East-Central Europe (www.klubwsl.lt in PL). 

His major fields of interest are history, politics, and culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its successor states. He has had numerous studies published in various European languages (Lithuanian, Russian, Belarusian, Polish, English, French, Italian, German, Hungarian) on historical, political, and cultural interchanges and conflicting national narrations. Kamuntavičius is the author of the first and only History of Belarus written in Lithuanian (to be published in summer 2021).  

Kamuntavičius brings experience of East-Central Europe to ASEEES, especially that of Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish cultural and political cooperation, culminating in modern memory wars and various pacification attempts resulting in an active search of dialogue.