José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published academic books on Russian/Eastern European comics, disability in comics and superheroes. His latest academic book is Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature (University Press of Mississippi, 2025). He also translates, writes fiction and makes comics, including for the collections The Phantom Zone and Other Stories (Amatl Comix, 2020), The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl, 2023), Puro Pinche True Fictions (2023, FlowerSong Press) and the novels Tales of Bart and Moscow 93 (both FlowerSong, 2025). His current scholarly projects include a monograph on the representation of historical trauma in Czech graphic narrative.  https://slavic.washington.edu/people/jose-alaniz

Gudrun Heidemann is Professor of Literature at the University of Łódź and Editor-in-Chief of the German Studies yearbook Convivium. In the academic year 2024/25, she was a Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald. She has conducted research and taught at the universities of Bielefeld, Bochum, Tübingen, Konstanz, Wrocław, Bamberg, and Greifswald, serving as a research associate, visiting professor, and recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the DFG (German Research Foundation), DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). Research interests: literature and visual media, graphic literature, and the media and poetics of forgetting and remembering. She is the author of monographs on Russian émigré prose in 1920s Berlin and on the photographic in literature and film. Recent publications: Grenz(über)fälle und Grenzgänge. Literatur, Kunst und gesellschaftliche Dynamiken ab 2000 (co-editor, 2026), Doing Memory Revisited. Transmediale und transgenerationale Aktualisierungen (editor, 2024), Offengelegte „Dämmerkonflikte“. Zum gesellschaftspolitischen Sensorium von Olga Flors Literatur (co-editor, 2024), and Lethe-Effekte. Forensik des Vergessens in Literatur, Comic, Theater und Film (editor, 2021) https://www.uni.lodz.pl/pracownicy/gudrun-heidemann

Gernot Howanitz is an Assistent Professor of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. As a literary scholar and trained software engineer he loves working on the intersection of literature, culture, media, and technology. His research interests include Czech, Polish and Russian literature from 1850 onward, Slavic new media, digital humanities, and AI applications in the humanities.  https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/slawistik/institut/howanitz/

Ralf Kauranen is a Doctor of Social Sciences in Sociology from Åbo Akademi University, awarded in 2008. He currently works as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku. He heads the research project Diversity in Finnish Comics History: Minorities and Self-representation, funded by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland and the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland. In his research, Kauranen has focused on Finnish and transnational comics culture from various perspectives. He has extensive experience in editing collections of articles in English and Finnish, as well as in co-authorship. His recent publications include “Refugee Comics and Activism as Comics Work: The Collaborative Production of Comics in the ‘Illustrating Me’ Project” (in Anna Nordenstam, Kristy Beers Fägersten & Margareta Wallin Wictorin (eds): Comics, Activism, Feminisms, London: Routledge, 2024), “Drawn into Krishna: Autobiography and Lived Religion in the Comics of Kaisa and Christoffer Leka” (together with Andreas Häger, in Kees de Groot (ed.): Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), and Comics and Migration: Representation and Other Practices (co-edited with Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä & Anna Vuorinne, London: Routledge, 2023). https://www.utu.fi/en/people/ralf-kauranen

Kai Mikkonen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. He serves on the Directors’ Board of the National Library of Finland, is an Executive Board member of the Association for Studies in Fiction and Fictionality, and a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on 19th- and early 20th-century French and British literature, travel writing, multimodal literature – including comics and picture books – and theories of narrative and fiction. He is the author of The Narratology of Comic Art (Routledge, 2017), Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction (Ohio State UP, 2015), Kuva ja sana (Gaudeamus, 2005), and The Plot Machine: The French Novel and the Bachelor Machines in the Electric Years 1880–1914 (Rodopi, 2001). https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/kai-mikkonen/

Pramod K Nayar is Senior Professor in the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India, and Distinguished Professor, Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. His books include Postcolonial Poetry and the Environment (2025), Vulnerable Earth (2024), The Human Rights Graphic Novel (2021), Ecoprecarity (2019), and The Indian Graphic Novel (2016), among others. Forthcoming are India and Imperial Vulnerability and The Environmental Graphic Novel. Nayar holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad, and is the winner of the Visitor's Award for Best Research in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences from the President of India. https://iith.ac.in/inst/pramodknayar/

Kees Ribbens is a senior researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, where he has worked since 2006. Trained as a historian. he is also an endowed professor of 'Popular historical culture of Global Conflicts and Mass Violence' at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His interest is in how memories of war, genocide and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are represented in words and images, in particular in the medium of comics and graphic novels https://www.niod.nl/en/staff/kees-ribbens

Svitlana Pidoprygora is a Doctor of Philological Sciences and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), working on the project Ukraine through Comics: National and International Representations from 1991 to the Present, funded by MSCA4Ukraine. She was a Prisma Ukraïna Fellow (Berlin, 2022), a URIS Fellow at the University of Basel (Switzerland, 2023-2024), and a fellow at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (Leipzig, Germany, 2024). Her recent academic publications on comics include “Mission Accomplished? Ukrainian Superhero Comics in Times of War” (World Literature Studies, 2025), “Ukraine and Ukrainians in the Panels: Global Comics Perspectives on the War” (TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 2025), “Documenting War in Ukrainian Comics: Shifting from Soldiers to Civilians” (Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2024).  https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/slawistik/institut/pidoprygora/

Svitlana Stupak is a PhD candidate at the University of Siegen, Germany, writing her dissertation on the construction of irony in alternative US-American comics at the turn of the 21st century. Stupak has published on auto(bio)fictional comics in such journals as Anglia and The Comic Grid. She also explores the Ukrainian comics scene, writing on how the local tradition creatively engages with topics such as postcolonial temporalities and national identity-building in representing the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. https://www.uni-siegen.de/person/svitlana-stupak

Svitlana Stupak is a PhD candidate at the University of Siegen, Germany, writing her dissertation on the construction of irony in alternative US-American comics at the turn of the 21st century. Stupak has published on auto(bio)fictional comics in such journals as Anglia and The Comic Grid. She also explores the Ukrainian comics scene, writing on how the local tradition creatively engages with topics such as postcolonial temporalities and national identity-building in representing the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. 

Anastasia Ulanowicz is an Associate Professor of Children’s Literature and Visual Rhetoric at the University of Florida, USA, where she is based in the English department and holds an affiliate faculty position in UF’s Center for European Studies. She is the co-editor (with Mateusz Świetlicki, University of Wrocław) of Fieldwork in Ukrainian Children’s Literature (Routledge 2025), the first Anglophone introduction to Ukrainian literature for young people. She was recently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where she began drafting a monograph entitled Through Western Eyes: Representations of Eastern Europe in Western Comics, 1989-2022. She is the editor of ImageTexT, an open-access journal of comics studies and visual rhetoric. https://english.ufl.edu/anastasia-ulanowicz/

Constance Uzwyshyn is a PhD candidate at the Department of Ukrainian Studies, University of Cambridge. Her project title is ‘Aesthetics of Time: The Palimpsest of Violence in War Art from Ukraine’. Her research explores art history and decolonial inquiry, and visual culture in conflict. She has lectured at Central Saint Martins and the Royal Academy in London on the Ukrainian art market and concepts of value. She is currently the moderator, co-ordinator and co-curator of Kultura, an online course on Ukrainian visual culture for the Ukrainian Institute of London. She co-authored War Diary for SCHUNCK Museum, produced artists’ monographs, and curated exhibitions. She previously served as director of ARTEast Gallery in Kyiv and, in 2027, is launching Art Arsenal World, a charity that promotes Ukrainian culture internationally and supports Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex. https://www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/people/constance-uzwyshyn

Victoria Yefymenko, Doctor of Philological Sciences, is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology and Intercultural Communication of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. She analyses contemporary fairy tales, picture books, comics, manga, and other multimodal narratives. Her publications include the monograph on the contemporary literary fairy tale based on the classic plot (Suchasna literaturna kazka na osnovi klasychnoho siuzhetu: strukturni, cognityvni, naratolohichni vymiry, in Ukrainian, Kyiv University Press, 2015), a chapter “Interactivity and Multimodal Cohesion in Digital Fairy Tales” (Mediation and Multimodal Meaning Making in Digital Environments, ed. by I. Moschini and M.G. Sindoni, Routledge, 2022), as well as other scientific publications (80 in total), mostly focusing on multimodal aspects of narratives. https://philology.knu.ua/struktura-if/kafedry/angl-fil/spivrobitnyky/yefimenko/