Małgorzata Abassy is Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, at the Faculty of International and Political Studies. She holds the posts of Director of the Institute of Russian and Eastern Europe Studies and Head of Unit for Modern Russian Culture and Cultural Systems Theory. She is a member of the following learned societies: Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (as of 2020), Societas Iranologica Europea (2011) and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences/ Commission of Slavic Culture Studies (2012). She has published five monographs (incl. Modernization in the shadow of Allah: modern Iran, 2019 (in Polish) and Culture against progress and modernization. Russia and Iran in comparative perspective, 2013 (in Polish) as well as several dozen research papers including comparative perspectives on Belarus, Russia and Poland.

Małgorzata Fijał is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of International and Political Studies of the Jagiellonian University. She is a winner of the scholarship of the Minister of Education and Science of the Republic of Poland for outstanding young scientists (2022). She is an MA in European Studies from the Jagiellonian University and from the University of Padova. She also has qualifications in the language and culture of Italy obtained at the University for Foreigners of Perugia and has experience in working in diplomatic and consular representations. She is a six-time scholarship holder of Erasmus and Erasmus+ programs (studies and internships) at several institutions in Italy. Her main research focuses on the culture and politics of contemporary Italy, with particular emphasis on identity issues. Her interests also include the Mediterranean region and the contemporary populist movements. She is the author of several publications on these topics.

Filippo Focardi is full professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padua. His research interests include: the memory of Fascism and the Second World War in Italy; the question of punishing German and Italian war criminals; the relations between Italy and Germany from the 19^th century to the present day. In recent years he has dealt with the policies of the memory of the European Union. Among his numerous publications, also translated into English, French, Spanish and German: La guerra della memoria. La Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi (Laterza, 2005); Criminali di guerra in libertà. Un accordo segreto tra Italia e Repubblica federale tedesca 1949-55 (Carocci, 2008); Il "cattivo tedesco" e il bravo italiano. La rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Laterza, 2013); Nel cantiere della memoria. Fascismo, Resistenza, Shoah, Foibe (Viella, 2020). For his studies on the Second World War he received in 2014 the Baron Velge prize from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Dr. Karolina Golemo - is a sociologist of culture, holding a degree in journalism and social communication. She is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Intercultural Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Her research interests focus on the cultural diversity of Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, artistic expression of migrants, music in intercultural relations and postcolonial relations in the cultural perspective (in the context of Italy and Portugal). She is an author, among other publications, of two monographs: The image of Poland and Poles in Italy, 2010; Italy. The Mosaic of Cultures, 2019 (together with Agnieszka Małek); recently she co-edited and co-authored two books: Remaking Culture and Music Spaces. Affects, Infrastructures, Futures, 2022 and Spaces of Diversity? Polish Music Festivals in a Changing Society, 2022. A list of her other publications is available at https://jagiellonian.academia.edu/KarolinaGolemo. In 2019-2022 she was one of the Principal Investigators in the international HERA-funded project European Music Festivals, Public Spaces, and Cultural Diversity (www.festiversities.org). Currently she is conducting a research on African cultural heritage in Portugal.

Tadeusz Kopyś, PhD is a historian at the Institute of European Studies of the Jagiellonian University. He specializes in the history of Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, national issues, and nationalism in this region. His major publications have covered federation matters in Central Europe (Oszkár Jászi 1875-1957. From the history of the idea of federation in Central Europe, Krakow 2006) as well as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and Polish-Hungarian relations in the twentieth century. He has held scholarships at several research institutes in Hungary and in the United Kingdom. Dr Kopyś' other publications include studies on nationality, such as The Nationality issue in the lands of Saint Stephen's Crown in the years 1867-1918, Krakow 2001), Polish-Hungarian relations in the years 1945-1970, Krakow 2015 and The History of Hungary 1526-1989, Krakow 2014.

Paweł Kubicki is a sociologist, an assistant professor at the Institute of European Studies at the Jagiellonian University. His research focuses on sociology and anthropology of the city, social memory,heritage and identity. He is the author of several articles on social and cultural aspects of urban question including six books, among others: European Cities in the Process of Constructing and Transmitting European Cultural Heritage (together with E. Mach) and The European Capital of Culture 2016 effect: how the ECOC competition changed Polish cities (together with Bożena Gierat-Bieroń, Joanna Orzechowska-Wacławska). His last research projects deals with the role of European cities in the process of constructing and transmitting of the European cultural heritage and the European citizenship in the post–totalitarian societies.

Renata Latała, PhD, is Senior Researcher and Scientific collaborator in the History Department at University of Geneva. After graduating from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, she earned a degree in European postgraduate studies at the European Institute of the University of Geneva and completed a doctorate in contemporary history at University of Fribourg. She was fellow from the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Lateran University (Rome) and at the Vatican Archives, Researcher and Teachnig Associate at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (University of Geneva), and currently, in the History Department of University of Geneva, she is Scientific collaborator in the Research team in conceptual history of the Cold War "Plural solidarities". Her research and work focus mainly on cultural exchanges, international relations and intellectual networks in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as on the intellectual history of Catholicism and the history of Central Europe.

Jana Pecníková, PhD. is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts of Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, where she is a member of the Department of Romance Studies. Her professional activities and research deal with the following topics: French language and culture; interculturality and intercultural communication; cultural and active citizenship in the EU; cultural and linguistic identity; and cultural landscape. In the given topics, she has been a coordinator in domestic and foreign projects. She is author of scientific monographs, university textbooks and scientific papers. She participates regularly in many Slovak and international workshops and conferences in cooperation, e.g. with the Jagiellonian University, Poland; or University of Rennes 2, France. She implements the modern and innovative trends from cultural studies research into university educational activities in Slovakia and abroad.

Andrea Pető is a historian and a Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, a Research Affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest, and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her works on gender, politics, Holocaust, and war have been translated into 23 languages. In 2018 she was awarded the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. She is Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Recent publications include: The Women of the Arrow Cross Party. Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War. Palgrave, Macmillan, 2020. And Forgotten Massacre: Budapest 1944. DeGruyter, 2021. She writes op-ed pieces for many international and national media.

Julio Ponce Alberca is Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Seville. He is a member of the Real Academia de Ciencias, Buenas Letras y Nobles Artes of Cordoba (Spain). He has evaluated papers for their publication in peer-reviewed journals and has been and is an expert evaluator for Tempus and Erasmus Mundus (Action 2) projects for the EACEA. He is also an expert evaluator for the Spanish National Agency, assessing K1 and K2 actions. He has collaborated with EPOS (Flanders Agency for European Programs) assessing K2 actions. He has been a visiting professor and/or researcher at several international universities and research centres: EVTEK University (currently Metropolia, Finland); Rafael Landívar University (Guatemala); Leiden University (Netherlands); Georgetown University (United States); McGill University (Canada); Babes-Bolyai University (Romania). He also teaches at the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE, specific courses for USA students) thanks to an association agreement with the University of Seville.

Grzegorz Pożarlik is a senior lecturer and former deputy director of the Jagiellonian University Institute of European Studies. He holds Ph.D. in Humanities from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University. His doctoral thesis analysed the Polish raison d’état in light of European integration processes. His research focuses on sociology of power, international security in the Post-Cold War era, civil society and public sphere in Europe, democratic deficit and legitimacy crisis in the EU, symbolic construction of identity in the context of the EU Eastern enlargement. His recent publications focus on dilemmas of collective identity construction in an enlarging EU, collective memory in post-communist society, global asymmetry as a background for the emergence of the Post-Westphalian paradigm in the international relations, the EU as a global normative power and sociologisation of security studies. He co-ordinates the Visegrad Network for Research and Academic mobility (VNDREAM) and Joint Master Degree in International Relations: Europe from the Visegrad Perspective.

Andrea Schmidt, PhD is a political scientist and an Associate Professor at the University of Pecs, Hungary, Department of Political Sciences, and International Studies and a former Visiting Lecturer and the Josai Institute for Central European Studies Josai International University, Tokyo, Japan, and Visiting Lecturer at Ivan Franko National University in L’viv, Ukraine. She studied at the University of Pecs, the Eötvös Lóránd University in Budapest and the Central European University where she participated in the Modern History programme focusing on Central and Eastern Europe. She also studied at the Jagiellonian University at the Faculty of History and at the Polonia Research Institute in Cracow, Poland. She specializes in International Political Economy and Comparative Political Studies of the Central and Eastern European region. She did her habilitation on International Relations focusing on Geo-economics. She is the author of several articles and book chapters related to Central and Eastern European and post-Soviet regions.

Joanna Sondel-Cedarmas - historian and political scientist,  Associate Professor of Political Science at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She is currently teaching Contemporary History at the University La Sapienza in Rome. Her research interests include Nationalism, Fascism, and the Far Right, as well as the memory of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Among her most recent works are: Le ombre del passato. Italia e Polonia di fronte alla memoria della Shoah (Viella 2018, edited with Francesco Berti and Filippo Focardi), The Right-Wing Critique of Europe Nationalist, Sovereignist and Right-Wing Populist Attitudes to the EU (Routledge 2022, edited with Francesco Berti) and Post-totalitarian societies in transformation: from systemic change into European integration (Peter Lang 2022, edited with Elżbieta M. Mach and Grzegorz Pożarlik).

Peter J. Verovšek is Assistant Professor (UD1) in the History and Theory of European Integration at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His first book, Memory and the Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War (Manchester University Press, 2020), received an honorable mention for the Best Book Prize of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) and was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association’s First Book Prize. His work has been published in a number of different forums, including Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, The Review of Politics, Political Studies, Memory Studies, Polity, Millennium and the public engagement platform Social Europe.