Mindaugas Šapoka

Mindaugas Šapoka is a researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History. He is a historian of early modern Eastern and Central Europe, especially Poland and Lithuania.  His book “Warfare, Loyalty and Rebellion: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Great Northern War”, was published by Routledge in 2018.  He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Aberdeen in 2015 after having completed Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in History at Vilnius University in 2009 and 2007.  From 2015 to 2016 he held a Jacobite Trust Studies Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. At Yale, Dr. Šapoka is working on a book project titled “The Great Northern War, 1700-1721: the war which shaped Europe.” When completed, the book will be the first synthetic assessment of the war in any language. In this war, of key significance in the history of early-modern Europe, the supremacy of Sweden in the Baltic region was challenged by Russia, Denmark, Poland-Lithuania, and the German states of Saxony, Prussia, and Hanover.  Dr. Šapoka emphasizes the crucial role of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the war, which marks the decline of Sweden as a major power and the rise of Russia’s military, political, and cultural hegemony in eastern and northern Europe.