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19 March, 2012. Centre for the Study of Central Europe at UCL-SSEES invites you to the discussion Grand Duchy of Lithuania: Common History, Divided Memory, with Professor Norman Davies. The discussion has been instigated by his recently published book Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2011), which invites us to reflect on a lesser known part of Europe, its history, legacy and memory.

Norman Davies, FBA, CMG, Professor of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Emeritus Professor of Polish History at SSEES in the University of London, and Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, is one of the best known historians in the world. He is the author of many bestselling works, including God’s Playground: A History of Poland; Europe: A History; The Isles: A History; Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw; and Europe at War, 1939-1945: No Simple Victory. His latest book, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2011) invites us to reflect on how ‘Europe's history is littered with kingdoms, duchies, empires and republics which have now disappeared but which were once fixtures on the map of their age’.

They include ‘the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for a time the largest country in Europe, […] much of whose history is now half-remembered – or half-forgotten – at best.’ The English-speaking world knows little of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which made its presence felt in thirteenth-century Europe, reached its greatest extent in the fifteenth century, and was finally destroyed along with the remainder of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. However, its legacy continues to be politically and culturally important in East-Central Europe. Several states and nations, including Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Latvia and Israel, but especially the modern republics of Lithuania and Belarus, share a common history in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but they are more often divided than united by its memory.

Professor Davies will be joined by two Lithuanian historians, Dr Zenonas Norkus and Dr Gintautas Sliesoriūnas, and a British expert on Belarus, in order to reflect on the extraordinary life and troubled afterlife of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Richard Butterwick. Following questions from the floor, there will be an opportunity to purchase signed copies of Vanished Kingdoms.

Public discussion – no prior registration or charge.

The event is supported by the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania, Lithuanian Institute of History and the University College London.

19 March, 5 pm, University College London, Wilkins Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre (Gower Street gate; UCL main quad, south-east corner entrance). Free entrance, no prior registration.