Mary M. McCarthy is a professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of memory studies, diaspora studies, feminist studies, and international relations, with a regional focus on Asia and the Asia Pacific. Her most recent publications include “The Creation and Utilization of Opportunity Structures for Transnational Activism on WWII Sexual Slavery in Asia” in Jenny Wüstenberg and Aline Sierp, ed. Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (Berghahn Books, 2020), “Political and Social Contestation in the Memorialization of Comfort Women in the United States” in Sabine Marschall, ed. Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement: Migrants and Monuments (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), and “The Enduring Challenges of History Issues” in Takeo Hoshi and Phillip Lipscy, eds. The Political Economy of the Abe Government and Abenomics Reforms (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She has been an active member of the Memory Studies Association since 2017.

Tamara Pavasović Trošt is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University (2012). Her research interests include nationalism and ethnicity, memory politics, and youth values. Previously, she was a visiting professor at the University of Graz, and spent the 2015-16 year as a Fung Fellow at Princeton University. Her most recent publications include Europeanization and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (co-editor, 2021), and various articles on history education and nationalism in Memory Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and War & Society.

Jill Strauss, PhD, teaches Conflict Resolution and Communications at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). Her research involves Restorative Practices and the visual interpretation of contested histories. She incorporates virtual reality technology in her curriculum so that students can make hidden histories visible by creating monuments in augmented reality. This project has grown into a collaboration with Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. Jill is a member of the MSA Museums and Memory Working Group and is co-editing a special issue journal with the MSA Witnessing Working Group. Jill completed her PhD at Ulster University in Northern Ireland in 2010, where she designed an innovative fieldwork project integrating storytelling and visual art for empathy and validation as one way to address a history of mutual humiliation and historical conflict. Jill is co-editor of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press 2019) along with other articles and book chapters.

Hannah Wilson is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Public History, Heritage and Memory at Nottingham Trent University, where she currently works as a research assistant. She has received funding awards from Midlands4cities and the La Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah for her ongoing research into the material memory of Sobibór. She is a Web, Blog & Social Media Coordinator for British Association for Holocaust Studies, and an MA graduate of the Weiss-Livnat International MA program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa. She has also participated in the archaeological research at Sobibór and Treblinka death camps. Hannah was also a placement content researcher at the IWM Holocaust Galleries for over a year during their development.

Tebessüm Yılmaz Wilke is a feminist activist-researcher based in Berlin. Until 2016 she was a Ph.D. candidate at Istanbul University’s Department of International Relations and Political Science where she was working towards her thesis on Turkish State Violence Against Kurds, Trauma, and Resistance in Kurdish Cinema. After signing a peace petition in early 2016 demanding an end to the violence in Northern Kurdistan (Bakur), she was forced to quit her studies. She is currently recommencing her doctoral studies at the department of Diversity and Social Conflict at Humboldt University in Berlin. She campaigns to secure persecuted academics, especially graduate students, a safe space to continue their studies at universities abroad. Her academic interests include feminism, feminist and queer theory, feminist and queer methodologies, memory studies, critical film studies, Kurdish studies, and transitional justice studies.

Jessica K. Young is an Assistant Professor of Global English at New College of Florida. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she cofounded the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies graduate and faculty reading group and coedited, with Michael Rothberg, Days and Memory, the blog of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Her research has been published in Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. She is an enrolled member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.

Catherine Gilbert is the MSA Executive Committee representative in the Ethics Committee. She is an Academic Track (NUAcT) Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests span postcolonial African literatures and cultures, with a particular focus on cultural memory, trauma and narrative. Her current project examines genocide commemoration and education in the Rwandan diaspora, working with communities in Belgium, France and the UK to explore questions of locatedness and the intergenerational transmission of memory. Her first monograph, From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women’s Writing (Pulm, 2018), received the Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award in 2019. She has recently co-edited, with Kate McLoughlin and Niall Munro, the volume On Commemoration: Global Reflections upon Remembering War (Peter Lang, 2020).

Ela Rossmiller is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Wilson College, where she teaches comparative politics and international relations. Her research concerns Polish legislative debates from 1989 to 2016 surrounding commemorative resolutions for martial law as well as rehabilitation and compensation laws for victims of political repression and anti-communist activists during the Communist period.  She is currently a research fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

Astrid Erll is a Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt. She has worked on German, British, South Asian, American, and South African literatures and media cultures. Her research interests include literary history (focus on 19th-21st centuries), media history (focus on film and photography), English and comparative literature, cultural theory, media theory, narratology, transcultural studies and – last not least – memory studies.

In 2011, Astrid Erll founded the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, a vibrant forum for memory studies across the disciplines, connecting researchers both in Frankfurt and internationally. And in 2016, she received a research grant from the VolkswagenStiftung for an “Opus Magnum” on the reception of Homer as cultural memory (“Odyssean Travels: A Literary History of Cultural Memory“).

William Hirst is a Malcolm B. Smith Chair & Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research in New York. His research interests encompass cognitive science, social aspects of cognition and memory. In recent years, his research has focused on how people remember public events, how social interactions shape these memories, and how communities come to share memories. Hirst has been at the forefront of the effort to find a place for psychology in discussions of collective memory, and to underscore the relationship between memory and the ways in which societies address past grievances and actions. Hirst received his PhD from Cornell University. He has published over 140 scholarly articles and edited four books and four special journal issues.

Ann Rigney is a cultural scholar and Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research interests includes Transnational Memory and the Making of Europe; The Poetics and Politics of Public Apology; Historical Fiction in/against Colonialism; Cultures of Commemoration; The Cultural Memory of Protest; Narrative in the Wild.

Ever since her PhD thesis (The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (1990)), Ann has been fascinated by the intersections between narrative, collective identity, and contestations of the past. She has published widely in the field of modern memory cultures, with projects both on the nineteenth century and on contemporary developments. She has also played an active role in cultural memory studies with a particular focus on issues relating to mediation and transnationalism.

Having served as Head of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication in 2017-2019 at Utrecht University, she currently leads the project Remembering Activism: the Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe, funded by an ERC-advanced grant; this will run until the end of 2023.

Michael Rothberg is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, and the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies. He is also co-organizer of the Working Group in Memory Studies and an affiliate of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

He is the author of three influential books: The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019) and Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), both published by Stanford University Press. And Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Michael teaches courses and directs graduate student work on contemporary literatures, critical theory, cultural memory, Holocaust studies, human rights, and postcolonial studies.