Speaker(s): Dr Laimonas Briedis (Vancouver)
Convenor: Dr Zbig Wojnowski (REES, St Antony's)
The lecture marks 700 years of the founding of Vilnius.
Laimonas Briedis is a writer and scholar of history, literature and the geographical imagination of Lithuania. A native of Vilnius (Lithuania), he has lived for most of his adult life in Vancouver (Canada) where he completed a doctoral degree in cultural geography at the University of British Columbia. He received his postdoctoral degree in history at the University of Toronto. His research and literary investigation explores the deepest cultural strands of Lithuania in relationship to different parts of the world. His creative output stretches from charting a GIS anchored global digital map of the multilingual literature of Vilnius to examining the ramifications of being bi-local; placing questions related to belonging, migration, diaspora, translation and memory at the core of his work. Laimonas is the author of many books, articles and works of translation, and he has presented his ideas and work at Tedx and on numerous radio and television programs in multiple countries. Among his non-fiction books is the bestselling Vilnius: City of Strangers, surveying the history of European culture through the changing cultural and linguistic landscape of Vilnius. The book has been translated into several languages, including, Lithuanian, German, Chinese, Russian and Portuguese. He is currently mining KGB archival files for his next book on the Cold War divide of his family divide between Canada and the Soviet Union, and is also writing a history of cultural memory of Lithuania. He is fluent in English, Lithuanian and Russian.
