Margaret Rung, Associate Professor, School of Liberal Studies, Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois
Lecturing: American and North American History
Host: University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia
September 2000-June 2001

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.

Rung and her husband Andy Virkus.

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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