Heather J. Coleman is Professor and Chair in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion, and Director of the Research Program on Religion and Culture at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929, editor (with Mark D. Steinberg) of Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, and editor of Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Source Book on Lived Religion. Her current book project is a social and cultural history of the Orthodox clergy in 19th-century Kyiv province. 

Jeremy Rossiter teaches Roman Archaeology and Latin in the Department of History, Classics, and religion at the University of Alberta. He first joined the (then) Department of Classics as an Assistant Professor in 1986. For many years he has served as Curator of the W.G. Hardy Museum of Near Eastern and Classical Antiquities. His research focuses mainly on Roman North Africa, in particular the site of ancient Carthage where he has worked as an archaeologist throughout his career. His work at Carthage has included the excavation of a Roman bath house as well as the ongoing study of thousands of Roman pottery lamps. His most read publication is a paper published in 2016 on the uses of the Roman amphitheatre at Carthage. In recent years he has been heavily involved in the publication of the pottery lamps from a number of American excavations at Carthage, results of which have been published in several volumes of the Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series, including For the Love of Carthage Vols.1 and 2 (2020 and 2025). He is a member of the Association internationale pour l'étude de la Mosaïque Antique (Paris) and will be talking today about a series of mosaics which illustrate the uses of the Roman amphitheatre at York in England. 

Tulika Singh is a PhD Candidate in History, writing her dissertation on concepts of bodies and disabilities in early India under the supervision of Prof. Dagmar Wujastyk. Tulika’s research interests include the social, cultural, medical, and disability history of premodern South Asia. Her doctoral project draws on textual and visual sources to examine how early Indian discourses on bodily impairments conceptualize “disability” in relation to identities based on class/caste, sex/gender, age, and religious affiliation. Tulika has an upcoming article with Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, titled "A physio-social model of bodies: Understanding notions of normative, nonnormative, and disabled bodies in early India."

Alexander W. Marcus is the Belzberg Family and Jewish Federation of Edmonton Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Alberta. His primary research focuses on Jewish communities of late antiquity (~2nd-7th c. CE), examining the Babylonian Talmud alongside contemporaneous literary sources and artifacts deriving from Sasanian Mesopotamia. He recently co-edited a volume titled Aramaic Incantation Bowls in Their Late Antique Jewish Contexts (Brown Judaic Studies, 2025). Marcus has also worked in the realms of Jewish education and conflict transformation. He has organized and participated in international conferences pertaining to Muslim-Jewish dialogue and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and he sits on the Academic Advisory Council of American Friends of Combatants for Peace. 

Anya Smolny is a Master’s student in Classics at the University of Alberta. Her research currently revolves around the 4th-century poet Claudian, examining his representation of the Underworld and how it compares to earlier representations, such as Ovid and Virgil. Her research interests include ancient magic and witchcraft, the chthonic in Greco-Roman mythology, and ancient sociolinguistics. Anya has presented and published her research on the relationship between Latin and Aramaic in the Roman Near East through HCRUS and Constellations previously as an undergraduate, and is honoured to be returning as a graduate.