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 If
you plan to teach in Latvia, bring your own chalk, says Margaret
Rung, who used an old sock for an eraser. She couldn't even make
photocopies in the University of Latvia's severely under-equipped
History Department during the 2000-2001 academic year, because
of a budget freeze. But in one of many contradictions that came
to characterize her Fulbright experience, she was able to borrow
a portable overhead projector, and even get computer training,
elsewhere.
She also was richly celebrated in Riga for the kind of work that
sometimes goes unappreciated in the U.S. Rung, an associate professor
of history at Roosevelt University in Chicago, was interviewed,
and given the VIP treatment, by the Latvian press; invited to
address embassy gatherings; and thanked repeatedly by students
for her "upbeat" attitude as well as for her courses
in history and economics. One, comparing Latvian and American
work styles, wrote that Rung "smiled a lot;" another
said she had "changed (his) life" by encouraging him
to pursue professional opportunities and by "seeming not
to mind" his poverty.
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Rung and her husband Andy Virkus.
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Rung, who was accompanied by her husband Andy Virkus, also participated
in several national conferences and contributed an article to
a Latvian journal. Her award was for lectures (in the school's
History Department and North American Studies Center), not research.
But what she discovered in Riga about Latvian "narratives"
of World War II aroused her professional curiosity about the relationship
between "accidents of geography and the way a country writes
its own history." In the U.S., the war has been seen as a
"good" one with a clear-cut enemy, she explains; yet
to Latvians it was a "senseless bloodbath" in which
soldiers from other places "stomped through, deporting or
conscripting people, and then either left-or occupied the country."
Like others before her, Rung was stunned by Latvian attitudes
towards cheating. "I had a guy doing phone-a-friend during
a final exam on his cell phone," she recalls, until she put
her foot down.
She is now working to connect the University of Latvia to a broader
international community of scholars, through exchange programs
with institutions in Mississippi and Wisconsin, and expects her
Latvian experience to enrich her teaching about ethnicity at Roosevelt.
Its inner-city campus is "more connected to black America,"
she says, "but I hope to introduce them to a region of the
world that isn't studied very deeply here."
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