Thea Bladt is a PhD fellow at Aarhus University’s History department. Her project “Commemoration and the Redress of Colonial Crimes in Denmark, the Netherlands and the US, 1990-2022” employs methods from memory studies, transitional justice and global history in order to investigate redress in a transnational manner. Amongst other things, she carries out a structured mapping of redress initiatives (e.g., changes in school curricula, memorials, political apologies, and museum exhibitions) across the three countries.The focal point of her research is in what manner the three states commemorate their histories as former colonial powers, who the main actors behind the redress projects are, and how various types of redress travel between the three national contexts and result in global redress spikes with local particularities.

Leroy Lucas is the founder of Keti Koti Utrecht – a local branch of the annual festival celebrating the Dutch abolition of slavery. Lucas has worked together with municipal politicians in Utrecht in order to realise a slavery memorial in Utrecht, building on a broader Dutch movement working on visualising the Netherlands’ colonial past in public spaces through the erection of first a national slavery memorial (in Amsterdam in 2002) and later other, local memorials. The Netherlands does not have a national Black Lives Matter organisation, but Lucas was one of the main activist forces behind BLM demonstrations in Utrecht in 2020.

Sara Dybris McQuaid is an Associate Professor at Aarhus University. She is a contemporary historian and political scientist who works mostly across the interdisciplinary fields of peace and conflict studies and memory studies. Her research pivots around how collectives remember, forget and archive their past, particularly as part of conflict and peacebuilding processes. She is currently working on dynamics of ‘multi-level memory governance’ in transnational ‘Administrations of Memory’. She teaches on the BA in Humanities and Conflict and the MA in Intercultural Studies at AU. She is a founding member of the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts at University of Copenhagen and she co-directs the working group “Transformations of Conflict” in the COST action Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change.