Dr. Genta Nishku

Professional Background

Dr. Genta Nishku is an interdisciplinary literary scholar of Balkan studies, memory studies, trauma theory, and translation theory. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan in 2023, where she also earned a graduate certificate in critical translation theory, served as a managing editor for Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation, helped to coordinate an interdisciplinary workshop of critical Balkan studies, and provided research assistance for public history projects. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in classical studies from the City University of New York, Hunter College.

Dr. Nishku’s scholarship encompasses politics, ethics, and the poetics of writing and remembering violent, traumatic events. In her dissertation, she theorized silence as a form of resistance against historical revisionism and the instrumentalization of suffering. Her research draws on time spent in Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia and uses multidisciplinary and multilingual sources to trace the development of post-socialist memory politics in the Balkans. She untangles how the Holocaust was appropriated to enter a European memory community, while post-Yugoslav and Albanian authors were being introduced to world literature. Additionally, Dr. Nishku is an active literary translator, poet, and fiction writer.

Fellowship Research

Dr. Genta Nishku was awarded a Fred and Maria Devinki Memorial Fellowship for her project “Historical Silences: Remembering the Roma Holocaust/Roma Genocide in Albania and Kosovo.” Her project examines the mnemonic landscapes of Romani persecution during the Second World War in Albania and Kosovo. In the Balkans, the memory of the Holocaust and the genocide of European Jews gained new prominence after 1989, becoming appropriated by political elites to construct new official narratives of history. Within these still-shifting politics of memory, the genocide of Albanian and Kosovar Romani, Sinti, and Ashkali communities receives no attention in public and academic spheres, despite the efforts of Romani activists, intellectuals, and writers to commemorate this atrocity. This project will historicize and examine the literary production of one such activist and writer, the Kosovar Romani poet Kujtim Paçaku, who advocated for memorializing the Roma Holocaust in Kosovo and Albania.

This fellowship allows Dr. Nishku the opportunity to utilize the USHMM’s collections of oral histories and testimonies, newsreels, photographs, poetry, and correspondence, to aid in identifying and analyzing patterns of remembrance of the Roma Holocaust/Roma Genocide in Albanian-speaking survivors, witnesses, and implicated subjects. Oral histories and testimonials held in the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies will be instrumental to her project, as they comprise a crucial source of remembrance beyond official, state-sanctioned historical records, as the project’s methodology is based on a close reading and listening practice that pays careful attention to the unsaid and quotidian gestures of resistance.

Residency Period: October 1, 2023 – May 31, 2024