Historian of socialist-era Albanian historiography and its party control
An Albanian scholar of modern history, she was a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Tirana and now serves as that university's Vice Rector for Scientific Affairs. In a 2017 article she showed that the Second World War became the central theme of socialist historiography because it legitimised the communist seizure of power in 1944, and that historical writing was a highly centralised process overseen by party bodies policing Marxist-Leninist principles and the party line. After the 1990s, as national history was revised, war history was revised too and historical writing became a more open process involving outside historians, though wartime accounts remained dominated by political and military history and national grand narrative.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 2000–2007Researcher, Department for Southeast European History, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
- 2017Lecturer, Department of History, University of Tirana; research on political myth in Albanian history textbooks
- 2020sVice Rector for Scientific Affairs, University of Tirana
Related historical events
The Graz years and the social history of the family
Gentiana Kera's research career did not begin at the University of Tirana alone. Her ORCID employment record shows that from 2000 to 2007 she worked as a researcher in the Department for Southeast European History at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz in Austria. Her work in this period centred on social and family history. In 2008 she co-edited a special issue of the journal History of the Family, "Urban household and family in twentieth century East and South-East Europe" (co-editor Gijs Kessler), and in the same year published "Marriage in urban Albania (during the first half of the twentieth century)" with E. Pandelejmoni. In 2012 she co-edited, with Andreas Hemming and Enriketa Pandelejmoni, the volume Albania: Family, Society and Culture in the 20th Century (Lit). These studies address everyday-life subjects such as marriage, household composition and urban life, and while their questions differ from her later analysis of socialist historiography and textbook politics, the methodological orientation carries forward. The Graz appointment marks the starting point of a career that subsequently returned to the Department of History at the University of Tirana.