Elidor Mëhilli is an award-winning author, Associate Professor of History, Public Policy, and Human Rights at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a visiting professor at Columbia University.
He received a PhD from Princeton University and has held fellowships and visiting positions at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, Germany, at Birkbeck College in London, United Kingdom, and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
Elidor’s work is on dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, and the diplomatic, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the Cold War. His book From Stalin to Mao received three prizes.
Other recent work includes archival dossiers on China during the Cultural Revolution and essays on cinema as an angle into histories of internationalism, on archives as places of erasure (including as part of the Republic of Albania’s official submission to the 56th Venice Biennale), and on Cold War radio wars.
Recent reviews include books on Cold War cultural diplomacy, Stalinism, Fordism, global Maoism, and German-language scholarship on Albania’s late dictatorship.
His opinions on a wide range of topics — dictatorships, disinformation, genocide in the Balkans, Brexit, soccer — have been featured in The Washington Post, Quartz, the BBC, the Voice of America, The Conversation, Salon, The Wire (India), and a dozen Albanian-language newspapers, television stations, and magazines.
He lives in New York City.