Elidor Mëhilli

Elidor Mëhilli is Associate Professor of History and Public Policy. He has held fellowships at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, and has been a visiting fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, Germany; at Birkbeck College in London, United Kingdom; and with the Workshop on Authoritarian Regimes at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. At the City University of New York, he has been the recipient of the Feliks Gross Award for achievement in the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences. Mëhilli has served as President of the Northeastern Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies organization, based in New York. At the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, he has convened a regular seminar in the study of modern Eastern Europe.

Mëhilli's research is on dictatorships, authoritarianism, and the diplomatic, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the Cold War. His first book From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World was based on eight years of archival research in Tirana, Berlin, London, Moscow, Prague, Rome, Washington, New York, and Palo Alto. From Stalin to Mao won the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, the Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, and the Stavro Skendi Book Award.

His other academic work has appeared in Contemporary European History, Slavic Review, The International History Review, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and the Journal of Cold War Studies. Recent work has included essays on cinema across Eurasia, the history of archiving, radio as an instrument of internationalism, and the study of Mao-era China via Albanian sources made available for the first time.

His popular writing and opinions on history, disinformation, genocide in the Balkans, Brexit, and other topics have appeared in The Washington Post, Quartz, The Conversation, Salon, The Wire (India). For over fifteen years, Mëhilli has also regularly written editorials for many Albanian-language newspapers and magazines (Shekulli, Shqip, MAPO, Dita, "Peizazhe të Fjalës," etc.) A contribution on historical documents as places of erasure and absence was included in the official catalogue of the Pavilion of the Republic of Albania at the 56th Venice Biennale.

• Princeton University (MA, PhD)
• Cornell University (BA, BS)

• “A Window into Mao’s China, 1959-1970,” commissioned by the Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
• “Radio and Revolution: Tirana via Bari, from Moscow to Beijing,” in Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, edited by Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 68-85.
• “Enver Hoxha’s Albania: Yugoslav, Soviet, and Chinese Relations and Ruptures,” in The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European History, edited By John R. Lampe, Ulf Brunnbauer (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 447-455.
• “Documents as Weapons: The Uses of a Dictatorship’s Archives,” Contemporary European History 28:1 (February 2019): 82–95.
• “Globalized Socialism, Nationalized Time: Soviet Films, Albanian Subjects, and Chinese Audiences across the Sino-Soviet Split,” Slavic Review 77:3 (Fall 2018): 611-637.
• From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Cornell University Press, 2017)
• Albanian translation: Nga Stalini te Mao: Shqipëria dhe Bota Socialiste (AIIS, 2023), expanded and updated.
• “States of Insecurity,” The International History Review 37:5 (2015): 1037-58.
• “The Socialist Design: Urban Dilemmas in Postwar Europe and the Soviet Union,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13:3 (Summer 2012): 639-669.
• “Defying De-Stalinization: Albania’s 1956,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13:4 (Fall 2011): 4-56.