Balkan historian whose Albania at War brought Albania's wartime experience into European historiography
Albania at War recast the occupation as fragmentation and internal division, a power struggle ending in the communists' rise and Enver Hoxha's regime; the war, he concluded, pulled Albania out of one isolation only to push it into another.
Historian of the Balkans and Albania, born 27 January 1952. He took his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982, was professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and is now professor emeritus there. He is a foreign member of the Albanian Academy of Sciences. Neither his citizenship nor his national origin is documented. His books include King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania (1984), Albania at War, 1939–1945 (1999) and Balkan Strongmen (2006); he co-edited Albanian Identities (2002) with Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and co-wrote A Concise History of Albania (2022) with Oliver Jens Schmitt.
Career Timeline
- 1982Receives Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara
- 1984Publishes King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania
- 1999Publishes Albania at War, 1939–1945, drawing on Italian, German, British and American archives
- 2002Co-edits Albanian Identities with Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers
- 2006Publishes Balkan Strongmen; elected to the Albanian Academy of Science
- 2022Co-writes A Concise History of Albania with Oliver Jens Schmitt