Artan Limani
Adjunct Faculty
Bio
Dr. Artan Limani is an Assistant Professor and researcher whose work bridges higher education policy development, civic engagement and democracy. He holds a BA in English Language, an MA in Professional Communication, and a PhD in Higher Education Development.
His research, grounded in Communication Studies, focuses on fostering socially impactful universities that transform students’ lives and strengthen democratic societies through policy, curriculum, and institutional transformation. Over the past two decades, he has contributed to higher education advancement in the Balkans and beyond, emphasizing quality assurance, internationalization, and digital transformation.
Dr. Limani has collaborated with colleagues at the University of Iowa, College of Education, on a major research initiative examining the civic role of universities in North Macedonia - one of the first studies of its kind addressing civic phenomena at the postsecondary level of education. By highlighting the civic dimensions of higher education, this work advances university reform through a cultural approach grounded in data and organizational sense-making. Among many of his engagements, he contributed to the USAID Transformational Leadership Program (TLP) in Kosovo, where he helped establish and implement the American University Preparatory Program (AUPP) at RIT Kosovo, a program that has had a lasting impact on students, faculty, and the wider community in Kosovo.
Additionally, his research on the impact of COVID-19 on North Macedonia’s education system, played an important role in informing national policy and school responses during the crisis, and later led to studies assessing how democracy is taught across high school curricula. As an international expert evaluator, he recently assessed the financial and staffing autonomy of the University of Montenegro. Together with colleagues at HAMK University of Applied Sciences in Finland, he co-developed a policy framework to transform faculties of pedagogy into Lifelong Learning Hubs for continuous teacher professional development, an initiative embraced by main education stakeholders in North Macedonia.
His current work focuses on critical transdisciplinarity in higher education, a politically engaged practice of dismantling disciplinary boundaries and hierarchical barriers to knowledge production, centering marginalized epistemologies to transform universities into spaces of resistance, resilience, and collective liberation. He is fluent in English, Albanian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Turkish.
Select Scholarship
Limani, A., Ziberi, L., & Lengel, L. M. (2025). Critical transdisciplinary pedagogy in response to neoliberalism: Reimagining higher education for democracy in North Macedonia. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 23(2).
Limani, A. (2024). Financial and Staffing Autonomy at the University of Montenegro. White Paper. Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education. Structural measures project. Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Program of the European Union.
Ziberi, L., Lengel, L., Limani, A., & Newsom, V. A. (2024). Affect, credibility, and solidarity: strategic narratives of NGOs’ relief and advocacy efforts for Gaza. Online Media and Global Communication. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1515/omgc-2024-0004
Ziberi, L., Lengel, L. & Limani, A. (2023) Visualizing Conflict: Analyzing Visual Narratives of Photojournalistic Images of Balkan War Refugees. Studies in Media and Communication, 11(6). https://doi.org/10.11114/smc.v11i6.6292
Barnhardt, L. C. & Limani, A. (2022). A Proposal to Assess Civic Capacities in Higher Education: A Case from the Western Balkans – North Macedonia. In Öztürk, M. (Eds.), Engagement with Sustainable Development in Higher Education: Universities as Transformative Spaces for Sustainable Futures. Springer Nature Switzerland. ISSN 2523-3084 | ISSN 2523-3092 (electronic). Sustainable Development Goals Series. ISBN 978-3-031-07190-4 | ISBN 978-3-031-07191-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07191-1.
Limani, A. (2021). Education during a pandemic: The effect of COVID-19 government measures on the education sector in North Macedonia (Research Report). “Through Dialogue to EU” project funded by the European Union, implemented by Open Society Foundation Macedonia. ISBN 978-608-218-336-7; COBISS.MK-ID 54771461.
Limani, A. (2021). Towards global citizenship through inclusive academic programs: How a non-formal higher education initiative in Kosovo transformed students into independent learners. In Book of proceedings: International Conference on Multicultural Education, 2–4 December 2020, Tetovo, North Macedonia (pp. 89–99). Center for Balkan Cooperation LOJA. ISBN 978-608-66247-5-0; COBISS.MK-ID 54294277.
Limani, A. (2025, May 29). North Macedonia’s universities need a complete reboot. Research Professional News. Clarivate.