Elisabeth Kovtiak obtained her Master of Arts in Culture, Media and Society at the Center for Social Studies, The University of Lancaster. She is currently based in Minsk, Belarus, and working as an independent researcher on projects on civil activism in Belarus and emotional culture in transitional societies. Prior to starting her work as a researcher, she worked as a columnist and journalist, writing on Culture and Visual Arts. She also worked as a project manager at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Minsk and on a range of independent cultural initiatives. Her academic interests include collective memory, digital scholarship in social studies, memory studies, nostalgia, popular culture, public spaces, sociology of forgetting, vernacular memory, and visual studies.