Herder-Institut mit Doppelpanel bei der AABS Convention 2026

Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) 2026 at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The 30th Biennial AABS Conference “Diasporas: Building Bridges Across Nations”, May 28–30, 2026

Since the 19th century, Baltic diaspora communities from around the world have played a pivotal role in sustaining and preserving their countries of origin. From the streets of Chicago to Rio Novo in Brazil, the diverse transnational networks of Baltic diasporas have withstood empires, world wars, Soviet occupation, and the Cold War to help forge new identities and memory as independent peoples and nations. Therefore, it seems appropriate to reflect on the genealogies and the social, political, and cultural contributions of Baltic diaspora communities worldwide, as well as the experiences and perspectives of diaspora groups currently residing in the Baltic region.

Panel

Shaping Identities I - Actors, Communities, and Narratives
Fri, May 29, 11:00am to 12:30pm, Lincoln Hall, 1022

Chair: Simon Donig

In line with the 2026 thematic focus of the AABS Conference, we suggest a double panel with four contributions each, reflecting on collecting in diaspora and exile as a social, communicative, and symbolic practice, as well as a basis for diaspora collections in memory institutions.
The first panel will focus on identity formation in the diaspora itself by actors, exile communities, and their media. The starting point is the collector Jānis Krēsliņš Senior, whose extensive New York collection was acquired by the Herder Institute in 2024/25. His collecting activities in New York and his work in the exile community are contrasted with the work of Adolf Eichler, a protagonist in the construction of a German diaspora in Central and Eastern Europe. His collection is now part of the Archive of Germans from Central Poland and Volhynia at the Martin Opitz Library in Herne. In addition, identity-forming narratives and canon formation will be discussed in particular by critically examining art history (examining the trends and dynamics of Estonian art history writing in the first wave of exile in Germany [1944–1950]) and the exile press (exploring it as a medium for community cohesion, based on the digitized collection from the National Library of Latvia and analyzing how these multilingual publications shaped collective identities by applying diverse digital methods).
We thus aim to lay the groundwork for a discussion on how memory institutions can preserve, curate, and make diaspora collections accessible to the public in light of critical archival studies.

• Jürgen Warmbrunn: Collecting in exile "never having left Latvia"—Jānis Krēsliņš Senior and his collection

In May 2022 the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe was first approached by the heirs of Jānis Krēsliņš Senior with a view to discussing the possible donation of his extensive Latvian exile collection containing books, journals, periodicals, archival materials, maps, music, paintings and other art work to the institute in Marburg. Given the extent of the collection situated in the former private residence of Jānis Krēsliņš Senior in the Bronx, it took nearly three years to organize the transfer of the collection to Germany where it arrived in the summer of 2025. The decision to give this huge and valuable collection to the Herder Institute was taken by the Krēsliņš family because the Herder Institute not only guaranteed the careful cataloging, indexing, storage, and accessibility of the collection for scholars and the interested public, but also made it clear from the start that it would make the collection one of the cornerstones (alongside, for example, the Lithuanian archive Reklaitis and the archives and libraries of the Baltic Knighthoods) for a future international center for exile and diaspora research on the Baltic region and beyond. The proposed presentation will describe the contents of the Kreslin Collection in more detail and also present the plans for the future “InDiaSpora” center, which will be anxious to establish cooperation with researchers and institutions in the Baltic region and North America in particular.

• Triin Metsla (Estonian Academy of Arts): National romantic art history writing in exile. The national art canon in the first wave of exile in Germany (1944–1950)

In my presentation, I will examine the trends and dynamics of Estonian art history writing in the first wave of exile in Germany (1944–1950). In the case of art historiography born in exile, it is important to consider how political and collective exile influenced the way Estonian art history was seen and written in exile. To ground this idea, I use the idea of collective exile, which I link to Benedict Anderson's concept of the 'imagined community', which refers to nationalism as a social construct that enforces nationalist sentiments and, in the case of exile, recreates a particular part of cultural memory. Drawing on Estonian historian’s Marek Tamm's writings on exile, I also argue that in exile, a new regime of historicity often emerges, in other words, a new way of seeing the historical past that transforms the seeing of the present. Carried forward by the new mode of historicity – triggered by political and collective trauma – I look at how national missions and art historiography were interconnected – what were the main historical and new narratives, themes, emphases in thinking about Estonian art and art history. Since much of the art literature (mainly art criticism) written in exile focused on the art produced in the refugee camps, I will involve both present and historical (how art produced in Estonia was seen in the past) art (history) writing.

• Timur Mitrofanov: Voices Across Borders: Analyzing Public Discourse in the Latvian Emigration Press

 The paper explores the Latvian exile press as a medium for community cohesion, based on the digitized collection from the National Library of Latvia. It analyzes how these multilingual publications shaped collective identities by applying diverse digital methods, such as topic modeling to detect dominant themes like folklore festivals and anti-Soviet resistance, sentiment analysis to quantify shifts in expressions, and network visualization to map relational graphs of recurring persons, organizations, and debate clusters – uncovering patterns in cultural preservation, such as the serialization of folk tales or calls for language maintenance. This reveals how specific narratives sustained Latvian identity amid displacement from the 1940s onward.

Shaping Identities II: New Approaches to Diaspora Collections
Sat, May 30, 8:30 to 10:00am, Lincoln Hall, 1028

Chair: Jürgen Warmbrunn

The second part of the panel “Shaping Identities” focuses on the diaspora collections themselves and their acquisition by memory institutions. Using the examples of the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture in Chicago and the diaspora collections of the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, such as the collection of the exile Jānis Krēsliņš Senior or the Lithuania Archives Reklaitis, the panel will examine the challenges that memory institutions face in acquiring, curating, and making these valuable collections accessible, and what solutions they find for these challenges. The panel will focus in particular on current and future approaches to these collections. For example, it will explore the question of how curatorial practice in museums, libraries, or archives can be opened up to those groups affected by the objects being curated and the knowledge created as a result, and how collaborative practices can be implemented. These collaborative practices are understood as relating to both the collection and the curation of the collections themselves. Against the backdrop of the concretization of the Semantic Web, the discussion about Collections as Data, and the development of AI, the panel will discuss analogue and digital participation models. The technological upheaval of recent years has enabled memory institutions to facilitate new ways of low-threshold access and participation for a wide variety of groups — from citizen scientists to researchers — across the entire data lifecycle.

• Lea Garcia (International Research Training Group “Baltic Peripeties. Narratives of Reformations, Revolutions and Catastrophes”): The role of community objects in diaspora collections

The paper presentation examines how community-based collection practices influence diaspora museums and how the respective objects function within the exhibitions displayed by these institutions. To answer these questions it considers examples from the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture in Chicago. Thereby, it relies on data collected in 2022 as part of a research project on cultural identity practices in the Lithuanian-American diaspora.

• Jürgen Warmbrunn: From the Bronx to the Marburg Castle Hill: the collection of Jānis Krēsliņš Senior in the Herder Institute

The paper will concentrate on the methods applied to cataloguing and indexing the different kinds of objects contained in the Jānis Krēsliņš Senior in the Herder Institute for Historical Research in Marburg. It will underline the value and importance of documenting with the utmost care the provenience of different kinds of materials contained in the collection using authority data as a prerequisite for linking objects that for practical reasons are registered in different databases (e.g. bibliographic and archival). The presenter will also describe the possibilities offered by Artifical Intelligence that will be employed to create interimistic bibliographic library records that will make information on the items contained in the collection available much more quickly than would be possible when using conventional methods.

• Agnese Bergholde-Wolff: Diaspora collections in dialogues: Sources for a history of Baltic exile art

The paper focuses on the novel opportunity to compare different (Baltic) diaspora collections in one place for the first time, using the works of fine art contained therein as examples. The direct comparison of artworks created in diaspora communities initially raises questions such as: Were there specific Baltic visual strategies, developments, and patterns of artistic creation in involuntary exile? Were there expectations of artistic creation from within the diaspora community itself? Were there connections with artists and art scenes from other diaspora communities? Were connections to the homeland maintained (or could they be maintained), and to what extent was this reflected in the artists' own work in the diaspora? In addition, the extensive contextual material contained in the collections, such as correspondence, personal documents, exhibition materials, publications, posters, etc., provides a rich source of information on the public perception of artistic life in the diaspora itself and beyond. Finally, aspects of the purely practical organization of artistic life can also be traced.

• Simon Donig: Collections and Archives as Contact Zones: Designing for Participation and Plurality in Cultural Data

The paper assesses and reflects the current state of the art in providing access to cultural data. It recognizes that archives and collections are not neutral repositories of heritage, but socially constructed spaces where power, memory, and representation are continuously negotiated. This is even more important for exile and diaspora collections where often individual collectors significantly shape the nature of the collection, which can become even more challenging when such collections are integrated into larger memory institutions by donation or other ways of acquisition. Drawing on examples from the Herder Institute‘s collections the paper develops the vision of an open curation system for cultural artefacts, offering a transformative model for how archives and collections are created, maintained, and interpreted in the digital age. Grounded in the principles of critical archival/collection studies, such a system would be designed to challenge traditional notions of archival authority, neutrality, and ownership by foregrounding both technically and in the way it designs user’s and research’s interactions to provide venues for participation, transparency, and seeks to ensure a multiplicity of voices.