Aline Sierp is Associate Professor in European History & Memory Studies at Maastricht University (NL). She holds a PhD in Comparative European Politics and History from the University of Siena (IT). Her research interests cover contested histories, memory politics, questions of identity and European integration. Before joining the University of Maastricht, Aline Sierp worked as researcher at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (DE). She is the author of History, Memory and Transeuropean Identity: Unifying Divisions(Routledge, 2014), co-editor (with C. Karner) of Dividing United Europe: From Crisis to Fragmentation(Routledge, 2019) and of Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (Berghahn, 2020, with J. Wüstenberg). Besides being the co-founder and past co-president of the Memory Studies Association, she also co-founded and directed the Council of European Studies’ Research Network on Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe. For more details, see https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/aline.sierp

Jeffrey Olick is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia, and Sociology Department Chair. He received a B.A. with High Honors from Swarthmore College (1986)  and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale (1993). While he has published on a wide variety of topics, his interests to date have focused particularly on collective memory, critical theory, transitional justice, and postwar Germany.  Current projects include on-going work on these topics, as well as editing a six-volume Cultural History of Memory and developing the outlines of “tragic sociology,” an approach with origins in Nietzsche’s writings on suffering and Weber’s sociological approach to theodicy.  He works with students on collective memory, sociological theory, symbolic politics, and history and theory of ideas and meanings, among other topics. For more information, see https://sociology.virginia.edu/people/faculty/jeffrey-olick

Jenny Wüstenberg is Professor of History & Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University and the co-lead of AIMS@NTU (Advancing Interdisciplinary Memory Studies) there. Together with Aline Sierp and Jeff Olick, she was the co-founder and past Co-President of the Memory Studies Association. Currently, she is the Chair of the COST Action on “Slow Memory: Transformative Practices in Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change” (2021-25). She is the author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany (Cambridge UP 2017, in German LIT Verlag/Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung 2020) and the forthcoming Slow Memory: Remembering Gradual Change in an Accelerating World (Oxford UP). She is co-editor, most recently, of Agency in Transnational Memory Politics(with Aline Sierp, Berghahn 2020), the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (with Yifat Gutman, 2023), De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places (with Sarah Gensburger, in English with Berghahn and in French with Fayard in 2023), and a special issue of Memory Studies (December 2023, with Jeffrey Olick and Aline Sierp). Her research interests concern the contentious politics of memory, memory and democracy, slow-moving change such as biodiversity loss, and the memory of family separation policies.

Catherine Gilbert 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). For more information, see: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/our-people/profile/catherinegilbert.html

Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska is a cultural scholar and sociologist. Her research focus is on cultural memory and visual history in Poland and Germany. Currently, she works on a project on the infrastructures of mediatized memories. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 at the University of Lodz and completed her habilitation in 2016 at the University of Warsaw. Since 2008 Magdalena has been assistant professor at the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the University of Lodz. From 2010 to 2015, she coordinated the project “Modi Memorandi. Lexicon of Memory Culture” (in Polish) at the Center for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Since 2015, she has been a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw. From 2018 to 2020, she was a visiting professor and Humboldt Research Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz. She is the Ambassador Scientist of the Humboldt Foundation in Poland. Her contributions include articles in “German Studies Review”, “The Public Historian” and “Participations. Journal of Audience and Reception Studies”. She published four monographs in Polish and German, edited ten collected volumes and authored more than fifty articles and chapters which appeared in Polish, German, English, Ukrainian and Croatian. Magdalena attaches great importance to academic transfer which is why she published numerous Polish translations of international literature in memory studies and visual history.

Jelena Đureinović is a postdoctoral researcher and scientific coordinator of the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Giessen. Her current research project combines the approaches of transnational history and memory studies and explores the role of memory in the context of networks of solidarity in the global Cold War and decolonisation setting, focusing on the agency of Yugoslav war veterans. She is also interested in the memory work of the far-right and specificities of memory politics in contemporary authoritarian democracies.
Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution (Routledge, 2020) centres on the question of how memory politics works, investigating the radical revision of the Second World War in post-Yugoslav Serbia. She developed the Memory Activism Programme at the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, where she is still involved in providing strategic direction.

More on: https://transformations.univie.ac.at/en/members-and-projects/jelena-dureinovic/

Sang-Hyun Kim is associate professor at the Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Korea. He holds a D.Phil. in chemistry from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Edinburgh. Kim’s research has focused on the intersections between history and sociology of science, environmental history, and intellectual history of development. His recent research interests extend to the analysis of the imaginaries and experiences of growth-oriented, technocratic development and modernization as key discursive and material sites of memory conflicts. His publications include: Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (co-edited with Sheila Jasanoff, University of Chicago Press, 2015); “Science, Technology, and the Imaginaries of Development in South Korea” (2017); “Korean Ecumenical Movement and the Politics of ‘Modernization’ and ‘Development’ during the 1960s and early 1970s” (2019).

Joanna Wawrzyniak is a senior researcher at the University of Warsaw. She is interested in developing memory studies at the intersection of sociology and history, as well as in exploring Eastern European memory processes in a global comparative framework. She has published among others in Memory Studies, Contemporary European History, East European Politics and Societies and Polish Sociological Review. Her books in English include co-edited Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (Berghahn Books 2016); co-authored The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (Berghahn Books 2015); and Veterans, Victims and Memory: The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland (Peter Lang 2015). Her current projects include work on memories of socialism, neoliberal transformation, and deindustrialization in Poland and contributions to collaborative research on cultural heritage and memory processes in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and East and South Asia.

Hanna Teichler is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She holds a PhD from the department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt, and an M.A. in English and Romance Studies. Her research interests include Anglophone world literature, memory studies, oceanic literature and cultures, ecofiction and environmental studies, as well as postcolonial literatures. Hanna is the co-editor of the book series Mobilizing Memories and of the Handbook Series in Memory Studies (with Rebekah Vince, both Brill). She co-directs the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform with Astrid Erll. In 2023, Hanna co-founded a new journal in memory studies, the Memory Studies Review (Brill, with Justyna Tabaszewska, Erol Gülüm, and Paul Leworthy).

Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, Belgium, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds(2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation(2005), and a co-editor of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies(2017). He has also co-edited two special issues of Studies in the Novel, on climate change fiction and postcolonial trauma novels, and one of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, on transcultural Holocaust memory. He has recently co-authored an introductory guide to the concept of trauma, which is forthcoming in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series, and is currently guest-editing a special issue of American Imagoon ecological grief.

For more information, visit his personal website at https://www.stefcraps.com/

Tea Sindbæk Andersen is Assistant Professor of Balkan Studies at the Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Tea’s research focuses on the contemporary history of Southeastern Europe, especially on issues related to uses of history, cultural memory, identity politics and popular culture in the Yugoslav area. She is the author of Usable History? Representations of Yugoslavia’s difficult past from 1945 to 2002 (Aarhus University Press 2012) and, with Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, editor of Disputed Memory. Emotions and memory politics in Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe (De Gruyter 2016)

Jonathan Bach is a Professor of Global Studies at The New School in New York. His work looks at social transformation in Germany and China with a focus on questions of memory, material culture, urban change, and space and identity. He is the author most recently of What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany (Columbia University Press 2017), (German edition: Die Spuren der DDR: Von Ostprodukten bis zu den Resten der Berliner Mauer, Reclam Verlag, 2019), and co-editor of Re-Centering the City: Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity (UCL Press 2020) and Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (University of Chicago Press, 2017). His articles have appeared in, among others, Cultural Anthropology, British Journal of Sociology, Cultural Politics, Public Culture, Theory, Culture and Society, Cultural Politics, German Politics and Society, and Philosophy and Social Science. He previously served as the co-chair of the German Studies Association Interdisciplinary Memory Studies Network.

Małgorzata Pakier is Head of the Research Department at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and advisor for scholarly programs at the European Network Remembrance and solidarity. Since 2011 she has coordinated, jointly with Joanna Wawrzyniak, the ‘Genealogies of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe’ program at ENRS. She is a member of the Social Memory Laboratory at Warsaw University. Pakier’s academic interests include social and cultural remembrance in Eastern Europe, the concept of Europeanization of memory, and Holocaust memory and representation. Her most important publications include: The Construction of European Holocaust Memory: German and Polish Cinema after 1989 (2013); A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (ed. with Bo Stråth; 2010, 2012); Memory and Change in Europe. Eastern Perspectives (ed. with Joanna Wawrzyniak, 2015).