Oliver Jens Schmitt is Professor of Southeast European History at the University of Vienna. He is the author of numerous monographs in German on Balkan history including Skanderbeg (2009), The Albanians (2012), and The Balkans in the 20th Century: A Post-Imperial history (2019). Since 2017 he has served as President of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences and as head of the Balkan studies department at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosova.