Dr Rob Perks is a former Lead Curator of Oral History and Director of National Life Stories, British Library, London UK, Secretary/Editor/Trainer, UK Oral History Society. From 1988 to 2021, Dr. Perks served as Lead Curator of Oral History at the British Library and, since 1996, as Director of National Life Stories, leading a team of interviewers, archivists, and transcribers engaged in oral history fieldwork across diverse sectors, including arts and crafts, business and finance, utilities, science, architecture, and publishing. Dr. Perks has played a key role in the Oral History Society as its Secretary and has been an editor of Oral History Journal since the late 1980s. He has also served as an advisor to various oral history organizations worldwide, including the National Lottery Heritage Fund (HLF) and BBC Radio in the UK, as well as projects in Canada, Greece, India, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, China, and Ireland. Dr Perks is the co-author of The Oral History Reader (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2015, with Al Thomson), a standard textbook in the field, and Ukraine’s Forbidden History (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1998), based on fieldwork conducted in the 1990s. 

Andriy Lyubka is a prize-winning Ukrainian writer, translator, and essayist. He serves as Director of the Institute for Central European Strategy (ICES) and is Vice President of PEN Ukraine. He is also a member of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize Committee of Ukraine. He studied Ukrainian Philology at Uzhhorod National University and received a second Master’s degree in Balkan Studies from the University of Warsaw in 2014. Andriy Lyubka is the author of several poetry collections, including Вісім місяців шизофренії (2007), ТЕРОРИЗМ (2008), and Сорок баксів плюс чайові. His prose works include КІЛЕР. Збірка історій (2012) and the collection of essays and columns Спати з жінками (2014). He is also the author of the novel Карбід (2015), which was a finalist for the BBC Book of the Year Award; the short story collection Кімната для печалі (2016); the collection of stories Саудаде (2017); the novel Твій погляд, Чіо-Чіо-сан (2018), book У пошуках варварів: подорож до країв, де починаються й не закінчуються Балкани (2019), which was also a BBC Book of the Year finalist. Other recent works include the novel малий український роман (2020), the collection of short prose and essays Щось зі мною не так (2022), the non-fiction collection Війна з тильного боку (2024), and the children’s book Казкето-дуркето (co-authored with Uliana Lyubka, 2024). In 2023, he was named one of the “100 Leaders of Ukraine” by Ukrainska Pravda and received the Aspen Institute Kyiv Award for Value-Based Leadership.

Serhii Bilivnenko is a Candidate of Historical Sciences, head of the Department of Source Studies and Public Communications at the Zaporizhzhia National University. He is a head of the Ya. Novytskyi Zaporizhzhia Scientific Society, author of more than 50 academic publications. Areas of research interests include source studies, oral history, ethnology of Ukraine, history of Steppe Ukraine, history of everyday life. Since 2003 Serhii serves as a head of oral history expeditions of Zaporizhzhia National University.

Halyna Bodnar is a Candidate of Historical Sciences, an Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary History of Ukraine at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and a member of the Ukrainian Oral History Association. Her research interests include oral history, Soviet Ukraine's social history, forced resettlement after World War II, and memory studies. She is the author of the monograph Lviv: Daily Life of the City through the Eyes of Migrants from Villages, 1950–1980 (Lviv, 2010). Since 2014, she has been involved in historical research projects focused on the experiences of the Revolution of Dignity and the volunteer movement in Ukraine. Among her publications are the co-edited volume On Dignity: The Volunteer Movement in Ukraine, 2013–2017 (Lviv, 2018, 816 pp.) and the collection of memories Maidan from the First Person: Regional Level (Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, Kyiv, 2018).

Maryna Chernyavska is a researcher of archives, an archival educator, and a practising archivist. She works as the Digital Archivist at the University of Alberta Archives, Canada, where she is responsible for developing and evaluating requirements, supporting workflows, and evolving strategic and operational planning to enable discovery, preservation, and access to digitized and born-digital archival records. Prior to the University Archives, for over a decade, Maryna had worked as an archivist at the University of Alberta’s Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore, where she managed the Bohdan Medwidsky Ukrainian Folklore Archives – a repository of predominantly audiovisual archival records. Maryna is actively involved in professional archival communities locally, nationally, and internationally. Since 2017, she has served as the chair of the Working Group on Archives of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore, and is a co-chair of the National Archives Committee of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. She has been active in the work of the International Council on Archives: as a Bureau member of the Section on University and Research Institution Archives (2016-2024) and recently as an ICA expert in a project that aims to support digitization and digital preservation in Ukrainian archives.

Alina Doboszewska is a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University, NGO activist: founder and president of the Dobra Wola Foundation in Krakow, member of the Polish Oral History Association and Memory Studies Association. She has completed several oral history projects in Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Sweden, and 11 documentary films based on biographical interviews. Her research interests include practical aspects of oral history methodology, forced resettlement after World War II, everyday life in Stalinist times and the movement of Ukrainian dissidents in the 1960−1980s.

Oksana Dovgopolova, Doctor of Sciences in Philosophy, co-curator of Past / Future / Art memory culture platform, Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. The main areas of research interests social reconciliation in the context of collective memory, Odesa image in “memory entrepreneurship”, the development of Odesa regional identity in time of Russia's full-scale invasion. From 2014 curates the projects of public history with the focus on social reconciliation. In 2019, together with Kateryna Semenyuk, she founded the Past / Future / Art project which implements educational and research projects, as well as a public program of activities to involve the wide audience into working through the past. Launched the development of the Glossary of Memory Studies for Past / Future / Art website. Co-organizer of the Laboratory of Artistic Research of War Experiences “Land to Return, Land to Care” (2022) and the Laboratory of Memorial Practices in Ukraine (2024). Co-curator of the Art exhibitions “From 1914 till Ukraine” in Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2023), “Ground Shadows” in Kazerne Dossin Memorial Center (2023), “Mikki-Mouse Steppe” in Odesa National Fine Art Museum (2024) etc. In 2024 co-curates the Ukrainian pavilion “From South to North” at the first Malta Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Tetiana Emelianova is a Candidate of Historical Sciences, director of the Central State Electronic and Audiovisual Archives of Ukraine. She is a graduate of the Faculty of History of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Tetiana is a well-known specialist in audiovisual archival studies, author of over 50 academic articles, laureate of the Vasyl Veretennikov Prize. Prior to taking up the position of director of the archive, she worked as the First Deputy Head of the State Archival Service of Ukraine.

Gelinada Grinchenko is a Senior Researcher at the Department of History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Professor at the Department of World History at Oles Honchar Dnipro National University; Co-Head of Ukrainian Oral History Association; Co-Head of the German-Ukrainian Historians Commission; Editor-in-Chief of the Ukrainian based academic peer-reviewed journal Ukraina Moderna. Her main areas of interest are oral history, the history and memory of WWII, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Memory Studies. She has edited several books and journals, and published many chapters and peer-reviewed articles on these issues. Her latest edited volume is: Listening, Hearing, Understanding: an Oral History of Ukraine in Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (in Ukrainian), ART-KNYHA, Kyiv, 2021. 

Erin Jessee is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where she works across the war studies, global history, and gender history research clusters. She is an oral historian with expertise on working with genocide-affected people in Rwanda and Bosnia, and regularly teaches introductory oral history methods courses, as well as more advanced courses on trauma-informed research methods and conducting research in conflict-affected settings. She also serves on the editorial teams for the Oral History Review, Journal of Perpetrator Research, and the Oxford University Press Oral History series. 

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is an oral historian and cultural anthropologist currently serving as the director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Huculak Chair in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, both in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include oral history, vernacular culture, diasporic and ethnic identities, labor migration, and immigrant letter writing. She has authored or co-edited several monographs, including Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland and Folk Imagination in the 20th Century (U of Wisconsin Press, 2015), The Other World, or Ethnicity in Action: Canadian Ukrainianness at the End of the 20th Century (Smoloskyp Press, 2011), Orality and Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines (U of Toronto Press, 2011), and Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe (U of Toronto Press, 2015). Dr. Khanenko-Friesen is the founding editor of Canada's scholarly journal Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning. Her current book project is tentatively titled Decollectivized: The Last Generation of Soviet Farmers Speak Out. Since February 24, 2022, she has coordinated a number of scholarly initiatives focusing on war testimony research, including hosting the Summer Institute “Witnessing the War on Ukraine.”

Oksana Khomiak is a Candidate of Historical Sciences, Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, board member of the Ukrainian Oral History Association. She also served as a senior research associate at the Museum of Kyiv History from 2013 to 2023. She has taught courses on Oral History and the History and Memory of the Second World War since 2019. Oksana holds a PhD in History (2017); her thesis focused on individual and collective memories of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS "Galicia" Division veterans. During the summer of 2024, she was a virtual research scholar at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In July 2023, she participated in a short-term research mobility program at the University of Glasgow and was affiliated with the UfG in 2023/24. Recently, she has been engaged in several research projects. Since 2023, Oksana has coordinated a documentation project, "Voices of the Russo-Ukrainian War," focused on experiences of Russian occupation and the everyday life of Ukrainian soldiers. She is also working on the ANSWER project, "Environmental and social anxieties and coping strategies over the past 50 years: A comparative case study in Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary," implemented at the Sociology Department of Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland) in 2024–25. In 2024, she co-headed the project “Oral History of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s Revival in the 1990s.”

Olha Koliastruk is a Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, and Head of the Department of Culture, Methods of Teaching History and Special Historical Disciplines at Vinnytsia State Pedagogical University named after M. Kotsiubynsky. Her research interests include the theory and history of Soviet everyday life, the history of Ukrainian and foreign cultures, visual history, oral history, and historical and cultural anthropology. Olha is the head of the Centre for the Study of Everyday Life, as well as the initiator and organizer of the All-Ukrainian Academic and Theoretical Seminar “Everyday Life: Visions and Meanings” (2015–2025). She also serves as the academic editor of a series of publications resulting from the seminar, a co-author of collective monographs in the series From the History of Everyday Life in Ukraine, published by the Institute of the History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Since 2020, she has headed the Research and Publishing Agency Book of Remembrance of Ukraine. Vinnytsia Oblast. In 2023, the agency published Book of Remembrance of Those Who Died for Ukraine. Vol. 1. 18.02.2014 – 23.02.2022. Residents of Vinnytsia Who Died in the Struggle for Ukraine’s Sovereignty: Participants of the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian-Ukrainian War.

Pavlo Leno is an Ethnologist, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Ethnology, and Cultural Studies, Faculty of History and International Relations, Uzhhorod National University

Anton Liagusha is the Dean of the Graduate Department of Social Sciences and Humanities. A Candidate of Historical Sciences. He is a researcher at the New School University Consortium (New York). He has taught courses at George Mason University and is an expert in public history, historical narratology, and media communications. He has experience implementing international humanities projects.

Iryna Lopushynska is a director of the State Archive of Kherson region

Svitlana Makhovska is a Ph.D. in History; ethnologist; anthropologist; Senior Research Fellow at the State Research Center for the Protection of Cultural Heritage from Man-Made Disasters; Research Fellow at the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; co-founder of the Chernihiv Research Center for the Anthropology of War; member of the Ukrainian Oral History Association; member of the Ukraine’s First National Team of Cultural First Aiders, which was prepared by the ICCROM (International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property); member of the Occupation Studies Research Network. With the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she became involved in organizing and conducting expeditionary research in the "war field" to document and preserve eyewitness testimonies of the Russian occupation of the Chernihiv region in 2022. She is currently responsible for developing the archive of the Chernihiv Research Center for the Anthropology of War, which, over the past three years, has collected oral history interviews with residents and displaced persons from the Crimea, Donetsk, Kyiv, Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Chernihiv regions. Svitlana is the editor and co-author of the publication series War, Science, and Emotions (War, Science, and Emotions: (Not)New Concepts and Approaches, Kyiv, 2023, and War, Science, and Emotions: (Un)Spoken, Kyiv, 2024), as well as the bilingual book Chernihiv during the War – 2022: Voices of Living Witnesses,Chernihiv, 2024.

Eleonora Narvselius is an anthropologist from Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests include Ukrainian memory culture, narrative analysis, ethnicity, and nationalism. Throughout her academic career, she has participated in several international research projects focusing on urban environments, memory cultures, and the cultural heritage of East-Central European borderlands. Among her key publications is Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet L'viv: Narratives, Identity, and Power (Lexington Books, 2012).

Ihor Poshyvailo is a ceramist, museologist, Candidate of Historical Sciences, director of the National Museum of Revolution of Dignity (Maidan Museum). He holds a PhD in History (Ethnology) from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Ex-chairman of the Museum Council at the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and the ICOM International Committee on Disaster Resilient Museums. When the full-scale Russian invasion started in February 2022 became initiator, co-founder and coordinator of the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative (HERI) and a member of the National Council for the Recovery of Ukraine from the War.

Tetiana Pryvalko is a Candidate of Historical Sciences, Chief Specialist of the Sector of Oral history and Preservation of Historical Evidence at the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. She is a member of the Ukrainian Oral History Association and co-coordinator of the NGO "STEREOTIME".

Iuliia Skubytska specializes in public history, oral history, history of childhood and human rights. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Skubytska taught at Princeton University and Bard College. In 2020-2022, she also served as Director of the War Childhood Museum’s Ukrainian office. In 2025, Dr. Skubytska is joining a research project “Nuclear Reaction on Khreshchatyk: Ukrainian Society and its Path from Perebudova to Decoloniality, 1986-1994” at ZZF Potsdam. She is currently working on a book that explores the Soviet colonization of Crimea and the role of the Artek summer camp in it.

Oleh Turiy is a Candidate of Historical Sciences, Vice Rector for Strategic Cooperation, Associate Professor of Church History and Director of the Institute of Church History of Ukrainian Catholic University. His research interests include the history of the Greek-Catholic Church in the Habsburg Empire, the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics’ underground experience in the USSR, and the post-Soviet transformations of the Ukrainian religious landscape. He is author and editor of more than 120 publications on church history and interconfessional relations, which have been printed in the English, Italian, German, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and French languages. He has received the Alexander Prize of the Gudziak Family Ad Fontes and awarded the Cross for Service to the Church and Pope.