George Gilbert is Lecturer in Modern Russian History at the University of Southampton. His publications include The Radical Right in late Imperial Russia (2016) and, as editor, Reading Russian Sources (2020). He has also contributed articles on aspects of the social, cultural and political history of the late Imperial period to leading journals such as The Russian Review, Kritika, and The Slavonic and East European Review.

Dr Olena Palko is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests lie in the field of early Soviet cultural history and the interwar history of Eastern Europe. She was awarded her Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia in 2017 and has held research fellowships at Humboldt University (Berlin) and Basel University. Olena is a co-ordinator of a digital project, Shadows of Empire: contesting territorial imaginations and borders in modern Europe, conducted at the University of St. Gallen. Olena Palko is a co-convener of the BASEES Study Group for Minority History.

Her first book, Making Ukraine Soviet. Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) was awarded the Prize for the Best Book in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture (2019-20) from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. She is also a co-editor of an edited collection Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing Borders in Twentieth Century, forthcoming in McGill Queens University Press in the spring of 2022.

Sasha Rudan (Саша Рудан) is a researcher at Uppsala University architecting infrastructure for the Retracing Connections project doing research on hagiographic texts in Old Slavonic and other languages. He is completing his Ph.D. at the University in Oslo on the topic of collaborative face-to-virtual systems for augmenting social processes, knowledge management and dialogue. He held research positions at Umeå University and the Queen Mary University of London. He is part of the Prismatic Jane Eyre project at the University of Oxford, working on the close and distant reading of “Jane Eyre” with a focus on stylometric and comparative analyses of the novel’s South-Slavic and Russian translations.

Sasha founded and co-leads the LitTerra Foundation that digitally supports literature, writing, cultural heritage, and digitally under-supported, mainly South-Slavic, languages and dialects. It provides DH platforms for computational text analysis (http://litterra.net/bukvik), visualization and digital heritage (http://litterra.net/litterra), and cross-language corpora. In conjunction with ChaOS (http://cha-os.org), an NGO he co-founded, it enables him to organize projects involving researchers, writers, and artists in the domain of socially-engaged art, culture, and sustainability.

As such, he is interested in collaboration on DH platforms for South-Slavic languages and heritage, as well as in co-designing collaborative platforms and model/game-based workshops.

Andy Willimott is Associate Professor in Modern Russian History and Fellow of the Institute for Humanities & Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. His books include the award-winning Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism, 1917-1932 (Oxford University Press) and Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide: Tradition, Rupture, and Modernity (co-ed. with Matthias Neumann), (Routledge). His research has been funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Leverhulme Trust. He was also recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Award (2017-18). His current research project examines the myth, memory, and afterlife of the Paris Commune in revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union.

Samantha Knapton is an historian of central and east-central Europe, international humanitarianism, and displacement focusing on the immediate post-1945 period. My monograph, Occupiers, Humanitarian Workers, and Polish Displaced Persons in British-occupied Germany is the first work to focus on the interconnected post-war histories of Britain, Poland, and Germany within the framework of international humanitarianism. Samantha is also the co-founder of a global network of scholars focusing on the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its legacies in modern international humanitarianism. As such, Samantha would welcome any postgraduate students wishing to focus on Polish history, Anglo-Polish(-German) relations, international humanitarianism, histories of migration, minorities, and displacement in east-central Europe, and post-war reconstruction.

Tom Parfitt studied Russian politics and language at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and lived in Moscow for twenty years, working as a correspondent for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Times.

During his two decades in Moscow, Tom reported on dozens of occasions from Chechnya and the wider North Caucasus. In 2008, he received the Royal Geographical Society’s Neville Shulman Award to complete a one thousand mile walk from the Black Sea to the Caspian across the northern flanks of the Greater Caucasus mountains - the journey which forms the backbone of his book, High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland, published by Headline in 2023.

Tom was a residential public policy scholar for six months in 2010 at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, a think-tank in Washington, DC. He studied the causes of the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus.

Tom has also written for The Spectator, The Sunday Times magazine, Details magazine (US), The Boston Globe (US) and New Left Review, and is a former Knight Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.

In 2022, Tom began a PhD in Creative Non-Fiction at Bath Spa University. His writing will examine the impact of the climate crisis and other environmental threats on Russia’s taiga and its inhabitants, both human and non-human. He hopes that a popular book about the boreal forest will result.