Mag. Dr.
Idrit Idrizi
MA
Idrit Idrizi is post-doc researcher in the research unit Balkan Studies and Principal Investigator of the research project “Foreign policy thinking in communist Albania and Romania” funded in whole by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (10.55776/PAT6757023).
Brief Biography
Idrit Idrizi (born 1986 in Shkodra, Albania) studied history and political science at the University of Vienna and the Free University of Berlin from 2005-2010 and Human Rights in Vienna from 2012-2014. His doctoral thesis on communist rule and everyday life in Albania "Herrschaft und Alltag im albanischen Spätsozialismus (1976-1985)" was published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg in 2018 and has won three prizes. From 2012 to 2017 he was a fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (DOC fellowship and post-doc track fellowship) and of the University of Vienna, from 2017 to 2021 post-doc university assistant at the Institute for Eastern European History at the University of Vienna, 2019/2020 for one semester fellow at the New Europe College, Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest, Romania (UEFISCDI Award Fellowship Program) and from September 2021 to May 2022 fellow of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Since June 2018, Idrizi has been a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institute for the Studies of Communist Crimes and Consequences in Albania. Awards: Richard G. Plaschka Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2016), Grete Mostny Dissertation Prize of the Faculty of History and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna (2017), Michael Mitterauer Promotion Prize for Social, Cultural and Economic History in Vienna (2017), UNIVIE International Award (2019), winner of the “International communism-themed research competition for young scholars” of the "Estonian Institute of Historical Memory” in the category “Published articles” (2021).
Research Interests
Period: 20th and 21st century
Area: Southeast Europe with a particular focus on Albania and Romania.
Topics: Communism (power, elites, repression, everyday life, emotions), memory of communism (Oral History, coming to terms with dictatorship), Cold War (transfer of ideas, global relations and regional exchange of the communist regimes of Southeast Europe), comparative, transnational and global history.
Selected Publications
- Herrschaft und Alltag im albanischen Spätsozialismus (1976–1985). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018 (Südosteuropäische Arbeiten, 161).
- Enver Hoxha’s Last Purge: Inside the Ruling Circle of Communist Albania (1981–1983), East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 36/4 (2022), 1091–1110.
- Stalinistische Machtspiele unter albanischen Kommunisten: Enver Hoxha und die Demontage Kadri Hazbius, Südost-Forschungen 80/1 (2021), 261–288.
- Between Subordination and Symbiosis: Historians’ Relationship with Political Power in Communist Albania, European History Quarterly 50/1 (2020), 66–87.