Research Scholar Dr. Daunis Auers Joins Department of Political Science
Daunis Auers (PhD, London) is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Latvia. He is spending the winter term of 2014 on sabbatical as a Baltic American Freedom Foundation (BAFF) research scholar with the Department of Political Science at Wayne State University. Dr. Auers is completing his book on The Politics and Government of the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the 21st Century, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan (London) in 2015.
Professor Auers was born and raised in the United Kingdom, but has been primarily based in the Baltic States (mostly Riga, Latvia) since 1993. He has a Master's degree from the London School of Economics and defended his doctoral dissertation, a case study of the role of political parties in consolidating democracy in Latvia, at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London in 2006. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005-2006. He is an active member of the Nordic-Baltic scholarly community, having served as Vice-President of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies and, more recently, as Latvia's representative on the European Commission's 7th Research Framework Program Committee for the socio-economic sciences and humanities.
Dr. Auers has authored and co-authored numerous articles and chapters on various issues relating to the politics and government of the Baltic States and edited a book on the relationship between Latvia and the United States in 2008 (Latvia and the USA: From Captive Nation to Strategic Partner). His most recent research has focused on the rise of radical right populism across the Baltic Sea Region.