Valeria Sobol is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include Russian literature and culture of the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries; nineteenth-century Ukrainian Literature; empire and the Gothic; literature and science; race in nineteenth-century Russia. Sobol is the author of Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (2020); Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (2009); and a co-editor (with Mark Steinberg) of the volume Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (2011). She has also published numerous articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as on Ukrainian literature. Valeria Sobol is the recipient of the Prize for the Best Article in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture (2018-19) from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies.

Oleksandra Wallo is Associate Professor of Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas, as well as the Director of Graduate Studies and the Director of the KU Summer Language Institute in Lviv, Ukraine. Her research interests involve twentieth and twenty-first century Ukrainian Women’s Writing; Nationalism Studies; Women’s Studies; Post-Colonial Approaches in Post-Soviet Studies ; Second Language Studies (Slavic Languages Pedagogy, Acquisition of The Ukrainian Case Systems, Processing Instruction).

Serhiy Bilenky is Research Associate at the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta and the Programs Director for Harvard’s Ukrainian Summer Institute. He received Candidate of Sciences degree from Kyiv Shevchenko National University (1997) and PhD (in History) from the University of Toronto (2007). Bilenky has also taught courses on Russian, Ukrainian, and East European histories at the University of Toronto, Columbia University, and Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. He’s the author or editor of the following books: Mykhailo Maksymovych ta osvitni praktyky na Pravoberezhnii Ukraїni u pershii polovyni XIX stolittia (Kyiv, 1999) (coauthored with Viktor Korotkyi), Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905 (University of Toronto Press, 2018). 

Olha Khometa is Assistant Professor in Soviet and Post-Soviet studies with emphasis on Ukraine in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Olha holds both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. She earned her Ph.D. degree in Ukrainian and Russian Literatures at the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2024. She is currently reworking her dissertation, entitled “The Politics of Style: Vestiges of Modernism in Ukrainian and Jewish Writing in the 1930s,” in her first book. Her research interests include modernism in Ukrainian, Jewish and Russophone literatures, the early Soviet cultural and literary politics, contemporary Ukrainian literature, and decolonization studies. For many years, Olha served on the Executive Boards of the Canadian Association of Ukrainian Studies (CAUS) and the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society in Canada. During 2020–2023, Olha co-organized a monthly literary series, entitled Contemporary Ukrainian Diaspora and Émigré Literature in co-operation with the Canadian Ukrainian Art Foundation.