Dr. Rasa Navickaitė

Rasa Navickaitė is a postdoctoral fellow and senior lecturer at the IIRPS VU. Currently she is implementing the research project „A Genealogy of Political Homophobia in Post-Soviet Lithuania: From Soviet Legacy to the Transnational Anti-Gender Movement“.

Between 2021-2024 she has worked as a research fellow at the research platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” and has been associated with RECET- Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna (Austria). There she carried out her postdoctoral research project “Modernization of Sexuality and the Construction of Deviance in Soviet Lithuania” (MoSeLit), funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions individual postdoctoral fellowship (MSCA-IF).

Dr. Navickaitė has given public lectures at the Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO) (Germany); Department of Polish, Russian and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, (USA), and the Research Center for Historical Studies (RCHS) University of Groningen (the Netherlands).

She publishes her research in academic and non-academic venues in English and Lithuanian language. Her primary research interests are LGBTQ people’s history, homophobia and anti-gender movements, feminist theory, gender history, Eastern Europe and (post-) socialism.

Dr. Rasa Navickaitė received her BA in Political Science from Vilnius University (Lithuania). In 2013 she received her MA cum laude in Gender and Ethnicity from Utrecht University (the Netherlands). She defended her doctoral dissertation in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University in 2020 (Hungary/Austria). During her doctoral studies she received CEU fellowship for a research stay at the Research Center for Historical Studies, University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and DAAD scholarship for a research stay at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe (Marburg, Germany).

Research projects and grants

Postdoctoral fellowship project “A Genealogy of Political Homophobia in Post-Soviet Lithuania: From Soviet Legacy to the Transnational Anti-Gender Movement“, (2024-2026). This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-PD-24-139.

“Modernization of Sexuality and the Construction of Deviance in Soviet Lithuania” (MoSeLit), Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) individual postdoctoral fellowship, European Commission, 2021-2023. The project was carried out at the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” (University of Vienna, Austria).