York alumnus wins dissertation prize

Posted on 27 October 2014

A former archaeology student has won the Landscape Research Group Undergraduate Dissertation Prize

Ema Baužytė

Ema Baužytė, who graduated in 2013, has won the Landscape Research Group Undergraduate Dissertation Prize of £250 for her dissertation Collective Memory, Society and a Communist Monumental Space After the Fall of the Regime, supervised by Dr Jonathan Finch.

Her dissertation looked at how Lenin Square in Vilnius, Lithuania was renamed after the fall of the Soviet regime and how its social use and commemorative function was re-negotiated, within the context of collective and post-traumatic memory. After a period of unease and redundancy following the removal of Lenin's statue, the government attempted to insert a nationalist narrative of the country's longer history of struggle for independence into the square. However, since 2009 it has emerged as an urban space with a strong popular association to music and the arts, that is now being recognised with its own novel forms of commemoration.