Michael Geyer has a PhD from the Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. He taught at the University of Michigan and as visiting professor in Bochum and Leipzig. He is most recently the author (with Konrad Jarausch) of Shattered Past; of Reconstructing German History; and of a forthcoming book (with Michel Espagne and Matthias Middell) titled European History in an Interconnected World. He has published extensively on the German military, war, and genocide as well as on resistance, terror, and religion. His current work focuses on defeat, nationalism, and self-destruction. He has been a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Humboldt Forschungspreis.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago, is the author of many books on Soviet social, cultural, and political history, including The Russian Revolution, Stalin's Peasants, Everyday Stalinism, and, most recently, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (2005). With Robert Gellately, she edited Accusatory Practices. Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989. A past president of AAASS, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, as well as a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Her current research topics include displaced persons in Europe after the Second World War. In 2008–9, she will be a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.