Aleida Assmann
Aleida Assmann is emeritus Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Konstanz. She studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen and taught from 1993 - 2014 at the university of Konstanz. After 2000, she taught as a guest professor at international universities: at Rice University in Houston in 2000, at Princeton University in 2001, at Yale University in 2002 and 2003, at the University of Vienna in 2005 and at the University of Chicago in 2007. Central topics of her research are: the history of media and literary communication, cultural anthropology, the rise and fall of the modern time regime, the role of generations in literature and society, social and cultural memory, trauma, and the history of forgetting, the formation of the EU and the future of the nation state. Together with her husband Jan Assmann she received the Balzan Research Price in 2017 and was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2018.
Omer Bartov
Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and the author of nine books. His recent publications include Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022). Bartov’s many edited volumes include Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (2013), Voices on War and Genocide: Three Accounts of the World Wars in a Galician Town (2020), and Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples (2021). Bartov’s first English-language novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in January 2023.
Kirk Denton
Kirk A. Denton is a professor of Chinese literature at The Ohio State University. He specializes in the fiction and literary criticism of the Republican period (1911-1949), but has also published extensively on Chinese museums and issues of historical memory. Denton’s edited collection, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature. 1893-1945 (1996) and his The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (1998) were both published by Stanford University Press. He is co-editor, with Michel Hockx, of Literary Societies in Republican China (Lexington, 2008) and, with Eileen Cheng, of Jottings under Lamplight: Lu Xun (Harvard 2018). He is also the editor of The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (2016). In addition to his book Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China (Hawaii, 2014), Denton has published several articles and book chapters on museum culture in China. In 2021, he published The Landscape of Historical Memory: The Politics of Museums and Memorial Culture in Post-Martial Law Taiwan (Hong Kong UP). Denton was editor of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture from 1999-2021 and continues to manage its sister website, the MCLC Resource Center.
Carol Gluck
Carol Gluck is the George Sansom Professor of History in the Department of History and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. A founding member and former Chair of Columbia's Committee on Global Thought, she specializes in the history of modern Japan from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with writings in modern social and cultural history, international relations, World War II, history-writing and public memory in Japan and the West. She has a B.A. from Wellesley and a Ph.D. from Columbia, and has taught at the Universities of Tokyo, Venice, and Leiden, Harvard, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her publications include Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, Showa: The Japan of Hirohito, Asia in Western and World History, and Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon. Her most recent Japanese publication is Senso no kioku [War Memory], 2019. Forthcoming are Thinking with the Past: Japan and Modern History and Past Obsessions: World War Two in History and Memory.
Rachel Ibreck
Rachel Ibreck is a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London and an associate of the Conflict Research Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Bristol (2009). Her research centres on memory politics in Rwanda and the politics of human rights, justice and civil society in Eastern Africa. Her book, South Sudan's Injustice System: Law and Activism on the Frontline (London: Zed Books, 2019) explores the power of law, and tenacious struggles for justice during a protracted violent conflict. Her expertise is based on over twenty years of interdisciplinary academic research and activist engagement relating to human rights violations, mass atrocities, and international human rights, peacebuilding and transitional justice interventions in African settings, principally Rwanda and South Sudan. Rachel has published findings from PhD research on the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda, and is continuing to explore the relationship between mourning, identity and rights after genocide and atrocities.
David Mwambari
David Mwambari is an associate professor at the faculty of social sciences at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven in Belgium and the Principal Investigator for the Traveling Memories, Silences and Secrets: Life narratives of Violence Among Refugees from Africa’s Great Lakes Region (TMSS) project funded by European Research Council (ERC). He is a core faculty and board member at the Oxford Consortium on Human Rights, University of Oxford. He was a former tenured assistant professor African Security and Leadership Studies, African Leadership Centre, Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy, King's College London, UK. He was an FWO postdoctoral research fellow at the Conflict Research Group (CRG) at Ghent University in Belgium, and an assistant professor of International Relations at the United States International University–Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. Mwambari has been a fellow at the Churchill College University of Cambridge, IACCHOS Université Catholique Louvain (Belgium), and African Academic Diaspora fellow at The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Senegal. His research interests include memory politics and peacebuilding in East and Central Africa as well as among Afro-Diaspora communities in Europe, North America, and South America. His publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and he is an editorial board member of Qualitative Research. He is a co-editor of a volume dubbed Beyond History: African Agency in Development, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield International and has two forthcoming manuscripts. Mwambari earned a BA and MA degrees in International Relations from United States International University-Africa, a Masters in Pan African Studies, Syracuse University, New York USA, and a PhD in History from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. His works have received numerous awards including the Nancy Millis Award for theses of exceptional merit and the Rhys Isaac Prize, both at La Trobe University, Australia.
Listen to the audio recording of the kick-off panel discussion with the advidory board on October 25, 2019 on "Globalized Remembrance? Conflicting Memories in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals".
