Prior to this, she held a Marie Curie Fellowship at COMPAS and a three-year research and teaching position in social anthropology at the University of Latvia. She received a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Dace has turned her doctoral dissertation on tolerance promotion and postsocialist democratization in Latvia into a book manuscript entitled Complicit Becoming: Tolerance Work and Europeanization After Socialism. Her second book project is on outmigration from Latvia and is entitled The Great Departure: Staying and Leaving as Tactics of Life After Post-Socialism.