Rory Archer, Visiting Fellowship 2024/25

Biography

Rory Archer is a social historian who works at the Research Centre for the History of Transformations, University of Vienna, and the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz, as a researcher and lecturer. His current research projects examine intra-Yugoslav Albanian labour migration in the private sector, and the Yugoslav workforce in postcolonial Zambia. His research interests include the history of labour migration, gender, race, and ethnicity in Southeast Europe.

Visiting fellowship November 2024

Motivaton

During the fellowship, my focus is the write up of a book and Habilitation manuscript with the working title Socialist Entrepreneurs: Intra-Yugoslav Albanian Labour Migration in Croatia. Through oral history and the examination of archival documents, the study provides a diachronic account of the intra-Yugoslav migration of Albanians to Croatia in the post-World War Two era, until the breakup of the Yugoslav state and unpacks what it meant to be a minority in socialist Croatia in two interlocking ways. Albanian migrants were a national minority as being ethnic Albanians in a largely Slavic environment. They were also an economic minority in the sense that many Albanians found work in the formally legal but morally questionable private sector of the Yugoslav socialist self-managing economy which prioritized the social sector. The study has been undertaken within in a research agenda of intersectionality due to the multiple minority statuses that rendered many Albanians in socialist Croatia institutionally invisible and unprotected. As well as writing I shall also use the opportunity to access materials at the University Library connected to this book project and my second project on Yugoslav labour migration in postcolonial Zambia.

Recent publications

‘“I entered the army as a Yugoslav and left it as an Albanian nationalist”: Albanian military service in the 1980s between coercion and the performance of Yugoslav citizenship’, Südost-Forschung (under review).

“Introduction: the Cold War of labour migrants: opportunities, struggles and adaptations across the Iron Curtain and beyond”, (coauthored with Sara Bernard & Yannis G.S. Papadopoulos). Labor History 64, 4 (2023): 321-329. https://doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2023.2227600

“Albanian labor migration, the Yugoslav private sector and its Cold War context”, Labor History 64, 4 (2023): 321-329. https://doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2023.2180625