Michael Brinley is a historian and researcher whose work focuses on Soviet socialism, urban planning, and the politics of space in the twentieth century. His current research examines the relationship between socialist political imagination, urban development, and the built environment, with particular attention to planning cultures in the Soviet Union and their global intellectual contexts. He has also written on Cold War cultural politics, architecture, and the intersections of political ideology and everyday life.

Alina-Sandra Cucu graduated from the Sociology Department. She has a PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University. She held fellowships at Max Planck for the History of Science (Berlin, re:work - Humboldt University (Berlin), Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin, and New Europe College (Bucharest). She was Marie Curie fellow at Goldsmiths University of London and ILO chair at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes. She taught at Central European University in Budapest and in Vienna, and as part of the OliveUP refugee programme at Bard College Berlin. Her first book, Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania was awarded the Ed.A. Hewett Book Prize for Outstanding Publication of the Political Economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe 2020, Honorable Mention. She is currently working on her second monograph, which investigates the incorporation of the Romanian car industry into global commodity chains since the mid-1960s.

Aleksandr A. Fokin is a Candidate of Sciences in History and Associate Professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). He also holds an academic position at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University and works as a Research Fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. His research focuses on Soviet history, late Soviet society, political culture, historical memory, and the material dimensions of socialism. He is the author of “Communism Is Not Far Off”: Images of the Future in Power and the Population of the USSR, 1950–1960 and editor of Made in the USSR: The Materialization of a New World.

Roman Gilmintinov is a historian of the Soviet Union specializing in environmental history, political economy, and science and technology studies. He holds a PhD in History from Duke University and is currently a research fellow at the Center for Science and Technology Studies at European University at St. Petersburg. His research explores the intersections of socialism, environmental regulation, resource management, and economic thought in the late Soviet period, with particular attention to coal mining and the valuation of nature. Gilmintinov has published widely in Russian and international journals, received multiple competitive research fellowships and grants, and presented his work at conferences across Europe and North America. In addition to his research, he teaches courses on political economy of the environment, academic writing, and historiography of science and technology studies

Alexey Golubev is an Associate Professor at the Department of History, University of Houston, where he studies and teaches Russian and European history as well as topics in the history of science, knowledge, and propaganda. His current research projects focus on the public dissemination of knowledge in the Cold War Soviet Union and on how early Soviet historians dealt with the legacy of colonialism of the Russian Empire. He is the author of The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s (Michigan State University Press, 2014, with Irina Takala).

Yooseong Heo recently received his PhD in History from Duke University. His research examines the history of computing, economic planning, and technocracy in East Germany during the Cold War, with particular focus on the VIS (National Economic Information System) project and the emergence of algorithmic governance under socialism. His broader interests include the history of political economy, the history of economic thought, and and the relationship between technology and governance in the twentieth century. He is currently revising his dissertation, “Rationalizing Socialism: Management, Information, and Technocracy in East Germany, 1953–1990,” into a book manuscript.

Alexander Herbert is a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who teaches environmental history, Russian, and European history. He is a specialist in the history of science and technology in the USSR, environmentalism, and political economy. He monograph in-progress is a history of floods and flood control in St.Petersburg/ Leningrad.

Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard UP, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell UP, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a European Research Council-funded project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.

Anna Krylova is an intellectual historian and award-winning author specializing in Modern Russian history, gender history, and historical and social theory. She has written extensively on questions of American historiography, social theory, socialist feminism, Western and Soviet Marxism, as well as modern Russia and the history of Soviet socialism. Her book Soviet Women in Combat (Женщина, социализм и война, Russian edition, 2026) won the 2011 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. Her forthcoming book, History-Writing or Sleepwalking Through History in Neoliberal Times, rethinks American historians’ encounter with the poststructuralist intellectual project and explores the analytical and political price the discipline has paid for the poststructuralist upgrade of its analytics. Her current book project is a new intellectual history of Soviet Russia, provisionally titled Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century

James Nealy received his PhD from Duke University. A specialist in the political-economic, social, and intellectual history of the Soviet Union, Modern Europe, and the world, his writing has appeared in Contemporary European History, Kritika, and Revolutionary Russia. Along with Emily Elliott he is the co-editor of the volume Soviet Workers in the World: Soviet Labor and Working-Class History in Global Context (Bloomsburg, 2026). He is currently at work on a history of labor in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s.

Elena Osokina is a historian of Stalinism. She writes on the economic, social, and cultural consequences of Soviet industrialization. She is the author of: Stalin’s Quest for Gold; Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia; Nebesnaia Golubizna Angel’skikh Odezhd, as well as other books published in Russian, English, Italian, and Chinese. She is a laureate of the Prosvetitel’ Book Prize (Best Non-Fiction), and the Metropolitan Makarius Book Prize (Best Book on Russian History).

Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, where he also directs the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. His research focuses on Soviet and post-Soviet cultures and societies in Eurasia. His current projects include studies of early Soviet pedagogy of images, and the history of Russian Formalism. Oushakine’s latest book, Dynamising Things: Essays on Objects, Relations, and People, comes out in the Historical Materialism Book Series by Brill in 2026.

Brian Porter-Szűcs is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His current work focuses on the history of economic thought in post-WWII Poland, and his newest book is Commodified Communism: Socialist Values and Capitalist Prices in the Polish People’s Republic (Oxford University Press, 2026). Prior to that, he published Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Oxford University Press, 2011), Poland and the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), and When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in 19th Century Poland (Oxford University Press, 2000). Porter-Szűcs has been a professor at the University of Michigan since 1994, where he teaches classes on the history of the economy, the intellectual history of capitalism and socialism, the history of Roman Catholicism, and the history of Poland. He maintains a blog called “Polish Polemics” (https://porterszucs.substack.com) which features weekly essays in both Polish and English.

Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architectural History at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Stanek authored Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020) and edited The Gift: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives (Jovis/ de Gruyter, forthcoming in 2026). Stanek taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, the University of Manchester, and held guest appointments at Harvard University and the University of Ghana at Legon. He co-curated the exhibition The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture at the Architecture Museum in Munich (2024).