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. 

Dr. Dagmar Wujastyk is Professor of South Asian Studies in the department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta.

She is trained as an Indologist specializing in the history, literature, and languages of classical India. Her research focuses on the history of medicine and alchemy in ancient and medieval India. Her publications include Well-mannered Medicine, Medical Ethics and Etiquette in Classical Ayurveda (OUP 2012), Histories of Mercury in Medicine Across Asia and Beyond (Special Volume of Asiatische Studien / Etudes Asiatiques, 2015), and Indian Alchemy - Sources and Contexts (OUP 2025).

Dr. Jeff Masse is an ATS assistant lecturer in the History, Classics, & Religion Department at the University of Alberta and a Sessional Instructor in the Classics division of MacEwan University’s Department of Humanities.

His primary research focus is Homeric poetry and early Greek Epic. His ongoing book project combines cognitive linguistics with recent developments in anthropology to explore how the Iliad and Odyssey conceptualize mortality through a sustained analogy with vegetation. This perspective challenges the traditional scholarly view that epic poetry transforms a mortal hero’s “natural” death into “cultural” fame. He advances an ecocritical reading in which Homeric epic presents the mortal being as a constitutive and inseparable element of a broader ecosystem, in which nature and culture do not exist as operative categories. 

Norbert Retkes, MEd. participates as the Austrian Doctoral Research Fellow at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta and a PhD candidate in Austrian Studies at the University of Innsbruck, where he also completed his studies in History and Geography Education. 

In his research he focuses on the Habsburg Monarchy particularly during the long 19th century. In his master's thesis he worked on tourism and cultural history in Transleithania. Among others he dealt with travelogues and guidebooks examining how these texts shaped spatial perceptions, generated mental imagery, and influenced how people understood their world and reflected regional transformations. His current doctoral project examines state-building and imperial governance throughout the Habsburg territories. By investigating legal societies and royal law academies, his work sheds light on imperial state structures, reform agendas at the intersection of administration, education, law, and the impact of the national idea.

Beyond academic research, he has played a leading role in school-based projects and workshops for young people focused on civic education and education for sustainable development. In the field of history education, he is specialized in teaching National Socialism and the Holocaust in Austria with focus on out-of-school learning sites and digital memory cultures.

Dominique Kirchner Reill is the Director of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies and a Professor in History at the University of Alberta’s Department of History, Classics, and Religion. Before joining the University of Alberta she was a Professor at the University of Miami. She is past president of the Central European History Society, co-founder and co-organizer of the first Central European History Convention, member of the board of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, and member of the board of the journals Contemporary European History, Journal of Austrian-American History, and Journal of Modern Italian Studies. 

Her work focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth- century Southern and Central Europe, with special emphasis on looking at nationalism, transnationalism, social history, and migration. Her first book, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice, was published by Stanford University Press in 2012 and was awarded the Center for Austrian Studies’ Book Award and Honorable Mention from the Smith Award. Her next book, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire came out in 2020 with Harvard University’s Belknap Press and received an Honorable Mention from the Jelavich Book Prize. The Fiume Crisis was also translated into Croatian in 2024 and published by Ljevak. She is also underway at finishing up writing the last pages of her next book manuscript "The Habsburg Mayor of New York: Fiorello LaGuardia."

K.D. Burton (she/they) earned her Ph.D. in Transatlantic History in 2015 from the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Burton is a historian of cultural and social history, specializing in the history of alcohol production and drinking cultures across the early modern Atlantic World.

She has taught history courses at the university level at the University of Texas at Arlington, Louisiana Tech University, and Loyola University New Orleans. From 2018 to 2021, she joined the staff at The National WWII Museum to create original classroom curriculum on the history of WWII, lead professional development workshops for teachers, and host the museum’s podcast, To the Best of My Ability.

In the fall of 2021, Dr. Burton joined the faculty in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at The University of Alberta to teach courses on US History, the history of gender and sexuality, the history of intoxicants, the history of race and slavery, as well as the history of food and drink.