Gregory Claeys is Professor Emeritus at the University of London. His eleven books, which have been translated into nine languages, include Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism (Princeton University Press, 1987); Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Unwin Hyman, 1989), Searching for Utopia: the History of an Idea (Thames & Hudson, 2011), Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford University Press, 2016); Marx and Marxism (Penguin Books, 2018), Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, 2022); and John Stuart Mill: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2022). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Turkish edn., 2017) and over forty volumes of primary sources, including Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (Hackett, 1992). He is editor-in-chief of a new collection of Paine's collected writings in six volumes (2026, forthcoming), and Chair of the Utopian Studies Society (Europe).

Małgorzata Abassy is an Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland where she completed a Russian and Oriental philology (Iranian Studies) study programmes. She obtained her PhD degree in the humanities from the Jagiellonian University. She holds a the habilitation degree from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, the Department of Literature and Culture Studies.

Her research focuses on culture and literature studies, from cultural patterns and mentality perspective in the Post-Soviet and Central Asia area to the Caucasus as the Russian Empire’s frontier, with a particular emphasis on the 19th century Russia and contemporary Iran. Her areas of expertise include the history of intellectual and social elites , cultural codes transformation, Russia – the West and Iran – the West interactions, Russia’s expansion towards the Caucasus, Russian literature as reflection of social and cultural processes, great Russian writers’ legacy, theory of culture and cybernetics models of autonomous cultural systems.

She is currently conducting research on : 1. social and political elites as culture-creating agents; 2. educational systems as an instrument of cultural engineering; 3. cultural codes and methods of their decoding and recoding; 4. Russia’s expansion towards the Caucasus.

She has authored over 70 articles and five books on Russia and Iran, in Polish, Russian and English. . She led and contributed to the management of research projects, including the tutoring and supervision of students.. She was the project manager in the following projects: “Women’s entrepreneurship in the COVID-19 period in cultural perspective. The case of Russia”, “Dimensions of friendship: between heritage of the Jagiellonian University’s ethos and future of science”. She is also a member of the international research platform “Contested Legacies. Central/Eastern and Southern European competing narratives on authoritarian lieux de mémoire"”. She received several research internships: from Moscow University, Russia (2016) St. Petersburg University, Russia (2019), Heidelberg University, Germany (2018), Vienna University (2022). She is a member of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES, as of 2020) and the Societas Iranologica Europea (S.I.E, as of 2011).

Abassy has contributed to the success of PhD students as the supervisor of PhD theses. She is a recipient of the Medal of Merit for Contribution to the Polish Science by the President of Poland, and several awards received from the Rector of the Jagiellonian University.

As of 2020 she has held a managerial position of the Head of the Institute of Russian and East European Studies at the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University.

Artur Blaim is Professor of English Literature at the University of Gdańsk and member of Academia Europea. He is the author of The English Robinsonade of the 18th Century (1990), Aesthetic Objects and Blueprints. English Utopias of the Enlightenment (1997), Gazing in Useless Wonder. English Utopian Fiction 1516-1800 (2013), Utopian Visions and Revisions (2016). He has co-edited several volumes on literary/cultural theory: Texts of Literature, Texts of Culture, Texts in/of Texts, Structure and Uncertainty and utopian/dystopian fiction and cinema: Imperfect Worlds and Dystopian Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (2011), Spectres of Utopia. Theory, Practice, Conventions (2012), Mediated Utopias (2015). Main research interests: utopia/dystopia in literature, film and other media, William Shakespeare, cultural semiotics, desert island narratives.

Harald Borgebund holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of York. He teaches political communication, democratic theory and political theory at Østfold University College (Norway). His research interests are liberal democratic theory, democratic theory and political communication.
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Teppo Eskelinen (PhD Jyväskylä 2009) is a political philosopher and social scientist. His research work focuses on themes such as political imagination, democracy, social movements, economic alternatives, and social change. His most recent edited book is The Revival of Political Imagination – Utopia as Methodology (Zed books). He has also published in journals such as Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, and World Political Science Review. Currently, he works as Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland and holds an associate professorship (title of docent) in political philosophy at the University of Tampere, Finland.

Gregory Ferguson-Cradler is an economic historian in the International Studies program at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He works in particular on financial history, politics and history of climate change, and political economies of natural resources. He is also interested in big data and computational text analysis in the social sciences and humanities.

Professor Ganga holds a BA in Political Science from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, in her hometown of Iasi in Romania, as well as an M.Sc. in Global Governance and Diplomacy from Oxford University where she was a Chevening Fellow. After completing her Ph.D. at Georgetown University, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Skalny Center for Polish and Central Eastern European Studies with Rochester University and a George F. Kennan Short-term Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. Dr. Ganga has published work on the economic consequences of illiberalism, foreign aid, Russian nationalizations, corruption and energy politics in Eurasia. She is currently working on a book manuscript dealing with the political determinants of switches between privatization and nationalization in Eastern Europe and beyond. In 2022, Professor Ganga was awarded the Sakip Sabanci International Research Award for Junior Scholars for her work on the economic consequences of populist governments. Additionally, her recent work has been published in Energy Policy and The Journal of Illiberalism Studies.

Piotr Matczak is professor at the Faculty of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University. He works on natural and man-made risks, crisis management, environmental policy from the perspective of ecosystem services, and sustainable development of urban and rural communities. He participated in several research programs, Polish and international ones, on those issues. He was Secretary of the Committee for Risk Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a member of the Board of Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty Research Network of the European Sociological Association. He is editor of the journals: "Society and Natural Resources", "Water" and "Geographies". He co-edited a special issue of the Water magazine entitled "Flood Risk Governance for More Resilience". He published, inter alia, in: "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", "Environmental Science & Policy", "Weather, Climate and Society", "Ecosystem Services", "Ecology and Society", "Earth's Future", "Global Environmental Change", "WIREs Water".

Lorenzo Medici is associate professor of History of International Relations at the University of Perugia. Among his main publications is: Dalla propaganda alla cooperazione. Le origini della diplomazia culturale italiana nel secondo dopoguerra [From Propaganda to Cooperation: The Origins of Italian Cultural Diplomacy in the Post WWII], Padova, CEDAM, 2009. His current research focuses on the role of culture in international relations.

Alejandro Romero-Reche teaches sociological theory, philosophy of the social sciences, and electoral sociology at the University of Granada (Spain). He has published several articles and book chapters on the sociologies of knowledge, humor, and popular culture. He recently authored an illustrated book on Spanish right-wing conspiracy theories, "Contubernios nacionales" (Akal, 2021) and a guide for sociological research on conspiracy theories, "Sociología de las teorías de la conspiración" (Síntesis, 2023).

Susanne K. Schmidt is Professor for Policy Analysis at the University of Bremen and, since October 2019, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Bremen. Her monograph The European Court of Justice and the Policy Process was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.In her research she is particularly interested in the impact of European case law on policy making.

Valentina Sommella is Associate Professor of History of International Relations. She teaches Global Governance and International Organizations and Geopolitics of China and East Asia. Before joining the Department of Political Science at the University of Perugia, she taught the History of International Relations at La Sapienza University of Rome and was Visiting Research Fellow at University College Dublin. Her main research interests lie in the foreign policy of liberal Italy; Italian foreign policy in the interwar years; relations between the Allies during and after WWII; and, more recently, the rise of China as a global power in the international system. She has participated in several research projects and has published three monographs and numerous articles in international journals, for example Un console in trincea. Carlo Galli e la politica estera dell’Italia liberale, 1905-1922 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2016), Dalla non belligeranza alla resa incondizionata. Le relazioni politico-diplomatiche italo-francesi tra Asse e Alleati (Rome: Aracne, 2008) and Un’alleanza difficile. Churchill, de Gaulle e Roosevelt negli anni della guerra (Rome: Aracne, 2005).