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.

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.

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.

Guido Bartolini is a FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, where he works on the cultural memory of Fascism in Italian literature and the idea of responsibility for the past. He is the author of The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (Palgrave Macmillan: 2021) and the co-editor of Mediating Historical Responsibility: Memories of ‘Difficult Pasts’ in European Cultures (forthcoming with De Gruyter in July 2024). He co-chairs the MSA Working Group on Memory and Literature. He worked at Royal Holloway, University of London and University College Cork.

Estibalitz Ezkerra Vegas (she/her) is the ACLS Emerging Voices postdoctoral fellow at the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Prior to her current appointment, she was the Etxepare Lecturer in Basque Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the politics of memory and solidarity networks in cultural production from conflict and post-conflict territories amidst globalization. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming with the International Journal of Basque Studies (RIEV), Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE), and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. She is currently working on two book manuscripts on memory and overlapping forms of violence in contemporary Basque and Irish literature and on the afterlives of Guernica, respectively.

Kaitlin M. Murphy is an Associate Professor of Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona, as well as affiliate faculty in the School of Art and the Human Rights Practice Program. She is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in the performative, political, and corrective potential of memory activism, especially in relation to atrocity prevention, decolonial movements, and democracy building. Her research draws on the fields of memory studies, critical theories of performance and visuality, human rights, genocide and atrocity prevention, and hemispheric American studies. She holds a PhD from New York University (2013), completed the Public Leadership Executive Education Program from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2022, and for the 2023-2024 academic year was a Charles E. Scheidt Faculty Fellow in Atrocity Prevention at SUNY Binghamton University’s Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. She is the author of Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas (Fordham UP) and co-editor of the recently-published Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism. Her writing can also be found in Memory Studies, Genocide Studies and Prevention, TDR: The Drama Review, Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, Human Rights Review, in various anthologies, and elsewhere. She has extensive administrative and leadership experience, including terms as Chair and Director of Graduate Studies of Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory, as well as Faculty Senator for the University of Arizona. She serves on the Executive Council of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and previously served as Committee Member of the Hemispheric Studies Forum of the Modern Languages Association, and as Co-chair of the Memory and Trauma working group of the Memory Studies Association. For additional information, please see https://kaitlinmcnallymurphy.com.

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.

Jeffrey Olick is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia and past co-president of the Memory Studies Association. Trained in the sociological tradition of Èmile Durkheim, he is interested in the production, circulation, and reception of collective representations about the past, especially emphasizing difficult memories (with particular, though not exclusive, interest in Germany). With Vered Vintizky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, he edited The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford 2011), with Stefan Berger A Cultural History of Memory (Bloomsbury 2020, six volumes), with Andrew Perrin two translations and critical editions of Frankfurt School works on public opinion (Guilt and Defense [Harvard 2010] and Group Experiment and Other Writings [Harvard 2011]), with Simon Lewis, Joanna Wawrzyniak, and Malgorzata Pakier Regions of Memory (Palgrave 2022), and with Hanna Teichler (2021) and then Aline Sierp and Jenny Wustenberg (2023), two special issues of Memory Studies (Memory and Crisis and Taking Stock of Memory Studies). With Aline Sierp and Jenny Wustenberg, he edits the book series “Worlds of Memory” (with Berghahn) and with Astrid Erll “Studies in Collective Memory” (with Oxford). He routinely supervises ph.d. and postdoctoral work in memory studies and related fields (transitional justice, trauma and disaster studies, as well as cultural sociology more broadly) and welcomes inquiries.

Valerie Rosoux is a Research Director at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). She teaches International Negotiation, Transitional Justice, and Memory Politics at UCLouvain (Belgium). She has a Degree in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Political Sciences. Her research interests focus on post-war reconciliation and the uses of memory in international relations. In 2010-2011, she was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (Washington DC). Since 2016, she has been a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. In 2020, she was awarded a Max Planck Law Fellowship (a multi-year project that has enabled her to form and lead a research group on Memory and Transitional Justice). In 2020 she was appointed by the Belgian Parliament to serve on a commission to deal with the colonial past and was the only expert who participated in the writing of both the initial and the final reports of the Parliamentary commission (August 2020–December 2022). She is now writing a book, provisionally titled Negotiating Decolonization: The Limits of a Fairy Tale, based on this long period of participant observation.

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is a professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University in Sweden. In the years 2005-2017 she was the head of the Centre for European Studies in Lund and 2018-2024 dean of research at the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology. Her main research interests are memory, identity and nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe. She has participated in many international research projects for example 2012-2016 she was the leader of the EU’s COST-action “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” , 2017-2020 a co-leader of Nordic research network on Historical Trauma and currently she is a co-leader of the Horizon Europe Widera project “Facing the Past. Public History for Stronger Europe” as well MC member in COST action “Slow Memory. Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerated Change”. She is the editor and author of a number of books and articles in English, Swedish and Polish. Among them: The Twentieth Century in European Memory, (Amsterdam 2017), and Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe (New York-London 2016). She is also co-editor for the CEU book series “Memory, Heritage and Public History in Central and Eastern Europe”.

Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He is also Principal Investigator of the research project Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave/Macmillan Publisher. His recent memory studies books include Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022). Victimhood Nationalism-A Global History (Humanist, 2021, Japanese translation-2022), Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgrave, 2021) co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft. As a memory activist, he has been co-curating exhibitions of “Unwelcome Neighbors,” “Naming Forced Laborers” and others. Most recently, he published “Die Causa Mbembe im mnemonischen Kontext des globalen Ostens: Gegen den Erinnerungsprovinzialismus der Mbembe-Debatte,“ in Matthias Böckmann, Matthias Gockel, Reinhart Kößler, Henning Melber eds., Jenseits von Mbembe: Erinnerung, Politik, Solidarität (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2022).