Monday, January 27, 2025
Bavjola Gami Shatro

Bavjola Gami Shatro is an instructor in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi.
When did you first develop an interest in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies?
Since an early age, I was fascinated by world literature and before finishing middle school I had read the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the Iliad, old tales from various countries of the world, Albanian epic songs and most of the tragedies of Shakespeare. It became clear that Linguistics and Literature would be my major in the university. As an undergraduate student, I was captivated by historical linguistics and world literature. It was by that time that I started to see that Albanian literature represented a field of research that waits to be further explored and inform both comparative and interdisciplinary studies in the region. I had the chance to see this while working on my graduate thesis, a comparative study on the philosophical implications of time in the prose of the renowned Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. Much of the history, mythology, folklore, ethnography of Albania, ancient Greece and other Balkan countries became central to my work. I continued to dive into the field in my PhD exploring contemporary Albanian poetry in Albania, Kosovo and the diaspora, focusing on the ontology of the poetic language. Eventually my career path was set: Southeast European studies. I continue to walk that path and I see how it broadens to encompass Eastern Europe and more.
How have your interests changed since your initial interest in the field?
Research interests are especially open to change and in my case they consisted of broadening the range of genres that I address. They now include poetry, archival documents and life writing, with accent on diary, memoir and epistolary. I have also included the interwar period in the 20th century and the 1940s. This is vital to understand much of what happened in communist Albania and how we can put it on the map of the Eastern Bloc and beyond when addressing totalitarianism. That said, I am more oriented toward interdisciplinarity too. The relations between literature and politics, history, law, sociology, memory, rhetoric, etc., have become critical to my work.
What is your current research/work project?
My current research project focuses on the rhetorical mechanisms of self-censorship in women authors’ life writing and the linguistic forms of rejection. Work with the archives is critical to this project, as is understanding of the significance of documents generated and collected in totalitarian regimes. How this affects their reading and understanding in our time and how that in turn impacts the way we understand the past, these are matters that interest me.
Tell us about your most interesting/enjoyable research or work experience.
For most of my career I have focused on introducing Albanian literature to the international academe through research on authors, genres, topics and periods that are little to entirely unknown beyond the Albanian area in the Balkans. For most of these, research is limited even within Albania. In this sense working on each project has been a major commitment and cause of immense joy to me. However, my most recent monograph published by Lexington Books, Essays on the Awareness of Loss in Contemporary Albanian Literature, represents an extremely enjoyable work experience. It is the first of its kind published in the U.S. on Albanian literature and writing it for this audience was both a challenge and an unmatched satisfaction. I concluded work with this monograph while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Mississippi in 2024 and it got published when I started my new position there as faculty. The Department of Modern Languages in this university publishes probably the most important scholarly journal in the States on South East European studies: Balkanistica. Therefore, this monograph became a milestone as I continue my academic career in an institution that has a unique contribution to South East European Studies in the U.S.
What do you value about your ASEEES membership?
There is much I’d say about this but I’d summarize it in the opportunity to communicate with excellent specialists of the field, and to get acquainted almost immediately with the most recent high quality research in my area of expertise and other related ones. Furthermore, participating in ASEEES’s annual convention is a great opportunity to collaborate with scholars with similar research interests. This academic association is inseparable from the history of research on the regions that it covers and Albanian studies have their own place there. I find this very inspiring.