Elidor Mëhilli
Ph.D. (2011) Princeton University
M.A. (2007) Princeton University
B.A. (2005) Cornell University
B.S. (2005) Cornell University
Email: elidor.mehilli@hunter.cuny.edu
Phone: 212-772-5485
Website: elidormehilli.com
Twitter: ElidorMehilli
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 A contribution on historical documents as places of erasure and absence was included in the official catalogue of the Pavilion of the Republic of Albania at the 56th Venice Biennale.