Dan is a Senior Lecturer in History at Liverpool John Moores University teaching in the areas of imperial, African, and international history. Dan’s research examines UK policy towards southern Africa. He is currently undertaking a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust funded project analysing British policy towards cultural relations with Rhodesia from 1965 to 1980. This follows on from a doctoral project which culminated in a monograph entitled British Cultural Diplomacy in South Africa, 1960-1994 published with Palgrave’s Britian and the World Series in 2024. Dan has published articles in leading international and diplomatic history journals and obtained multiple research grants from bodies such as the Royal Historical Society, the British International Studies Association, and the British Society of Sports History. Dan has worked collaboratively with organisations such as the British Council and AM Digital and is also a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria and an Extraordinary Researcher at North West University, Mahikeng. Dan is also a member of the British International History Group’s executive committee and is on the steering committee for the International History Seminar of the North. Dan has appeared on Sky News discussing contemporary South African politics and has written for broader audiences beyond academia in publications such as The Conversation. 

Sylvia is assistant professor at the History Department of the Universidad Católica de Chile. She holds a PhD in History from the Freie Universität Berlin and a MA and BA in History from the Universidad Católica de Chile, where she also obtained a BA in Design. Her lines of research are framed in the cultural and transnational history of Latin America, with special attention to public and cultural diplomacy in the inter-war period. Her doctoral research, entitled ‘In Defence of the Revolution’, focused on Mexico's public diplomacy towards the United States during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). It received the “Genaro Estrada” recognition from the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Subsequently, she has been awarded two research grants by the Chilean government's research agency (ANID) to study Chile's public diplomacy (Fondecyt Postdoctorado Nº 3200615 and Fondecyt de Iniciación Nº 11251333). Through these she has delved into Chile's participation in universal exhibitions; the role of the poet and Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral in Chilean cultural diplomacy from her consular post; and the foreign propaganda magazines produced by Latin American consulates in the 1920s. Her works have appeared in several journals and edited volumes. She is the coeditor of Soft Power beyond the Nation (Georgtown University Press, 2024) and author of Sin tropicalismos ni exageraciones: la construcción de la imagen de Chile para la Exposición Iberoamericana de Sevilla en 1929 [‘Without tropicalisms or exaggerations: the construction of the image of Chile for the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville in 1929’] (RIL, 2012).

Alice is a senior lecturer in British history at Aix Marseille University. Her research explores different facets of British cultural diplomacy in the 20th century, ranging from print propaganda in World War Two and the early Cold War, to the development of academic exchange programmes. She has published in a number of edited volumes as well as in journals such as Contemporary British History and Contemporary European History. She is currently completing a study of public-private co-operation at Expo ’58 as part of a European funded project “Museums and Industry: Long Histories of Collaboration” (JPI CH CHSE 2023-2025). A further strand of her research is concerned with international cultural relations, soft power and decolonisation. Expanding on her 2016 study of the estblishment of the British Council in post-independence India, she is in the early stages of a book project examining Indo-British cultural relations 1947-1964, with a particular focus on the role of universities, learned societies and scientists.

Luis is a ‘Ramón y Cajal’ Research Fellow in Contemporary History at the Complutense University of Madrid. After completing a PhD (European distinction) at the University of Zaragoza in 2014, he held postdoctoral positions at the Universidad de Concepción (Chile), University of Essex (UK) and Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (Basque Country, Spain). His research explores the history of Spanish cultural diplomacy, with a special focus on the emergence of Spanish language education as a soft-power resource. His works have appeared in Contemporary European History, Ayer and the Journal of Borderlands Studies, as well as in several edited volumes. He is the author of Cultural Diplomacy: A Hundred Years of History of the British-Spanish Society (Liverpool University Press, 2016), which examines the history of a cultural institution at the heart of the relationship between Britain and the Spanish-speaking world in the twentieth century.

Marició is Full Professor at the Department of Humanities of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). She has been director of the Jaume Vicens i Vives University Institute of History (2013-2016). She has been a researcher in the Humboldt Universität Berlin, Institut für Geschichtswissenchaft and in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte Berlin (DAAD Grant. Programme: Research Stays for University Academics and Scientists, 2017). Previously she was a researcher in various university centres: in Germany, Universität Bielefeld, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M, Institut für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Berlin; in Italy, Università degli Studi di Pisa; in Catalonia, in the Jaume Vicens i Vives University Institute of History (reinstatement of doctors) and in the UPF Department of Humanities (Ramón y Cajal). Her research mainly focusses on three lines: A first line centres on the political and social history of Catalonia and Spain in the 19th century. A second line centres on the political and social history of Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lastly, her current research interests focus on Spanish-German relations in the period 1870-1959; particularly, the ties between cultural relations and political interests.

Darius is a cultural and international historian, focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first century cultural interactions between the United States, Britain, Iran, and the wider Middle East. His research focuses on how Anglo-American state and non-state actors persuaded and attracted Iranian and Middle Eastern peoples and organisations towards adopting their norms, values, and ideas. His work has examined the work of the British Council; reflected on American sport diplomacy; and explored the failings of both the Smithsonian Institute and the United States Information Agency’s overseas exhibits.

Pia is a political and cultural historian, specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She works as a Senior Lecturer in European and World History, at the University of Turku (Finland) and holds the title of Associate Professor of Russian history. She has worked on international youth and student organizations, mega-events, state visits, the history of experience, and memory. Her recent publications include a monograph Performing Peace and Friendship. The World Youth Festivals and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy (De Gruyter, 2023). In 2020–2024, she led a project funded by the Research Council of Finland, Mission Finland. Cold War Cultural Diplomacy at the Cross-roads of East and West, which examined the cultural operations of the Cold War superpowers in Finland in 1945–1991. Currently, Pia is writing a monograph on the use of Lenin museums in Soviet cultural diplomacy and the politics of memory beyond the Soviet borders. She serves as the head of the Finnish Association for Russian and East European Studies (FAREES), is a board member in the International Council of Central and East European Studies (ICCEES), and is an editor in the Finnish journal of contemporary history (Lähihistoria).

Nicola is a political historian primarily occupied with fascist studies and the cultural dimension of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. He is a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with the project “YTOPIA – Yamatology of the Axis. Japan as a Nazi-Fascist Utopia of Political Renewal”, which is being carried out in collaboration with the Kyoto Sangyo University and the University of Konstanz, exploring the discursive construction of the image of Japan in the framework of the Axis cultural policy. His research interests include German-Italian cultural relations, the history of geopolitical thought, and European representation of Japan during the first half of the 20th century. Among his recent publications: “Karl Haushofer as a ‘pioneer’ of National Socialist cultural diplomacy in fascist Italy” in Central European History (2019); “Dal Lebensraum allo spazio vitale: La ricezione politica del pensiero di Ratzel in Italia, 1900–1943” in Geographica Helvetica (2022); “Abweichende Perspektiven einer geteilten Propaganda. Die visuelle Darstellung Japans im faschistischen Italien und in NS-Deutschland” in OAG-Notizen (2023). 

Mélanie is professor of British and Commonwealth history at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens. An honourary fellow of the Institut universitaire de France, where she was a junior member (2016-2021), she is senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. She currently serves on the editorial boards of The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies and the Journal of Global Security Studies, and was part of the advisory team for the American Committee on Africa: Liberation Movements, Solidarity and Activism (Adam Matthew Digital and Amistad Research Center). Her research focuses on the connected ends of the British and French empires, and their impact on state and society in the (former) metropoles and on diplomatic cultures. Her most recent book is Algerian Independence and the British Left: Resistance and Solidarities in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2024).  She was a member of the scientific committee of the exhibition, “Paris-Londres: music connections (1962-1989)” at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration (Paris, 2019-2020), and the historical adviser for the documentary “La décolonisation britannique: l’art de filer à l’anglaise” by Deborah Ford (ARTE & CinéTV, 2020-21).

Jahn studied history and political science in Erlangen from 2016 to 2023. He holds a bachelor's degree in history and political science and a master's degree in history. He is currently a research assistant at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Since 2023, he has been working on a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on the history of the Goethe-Institut, the main organization for language promotion and representation of German culture abroad. His dissertation project examines the history of the Goethe-Institut in Poland and South Africa and places it in the context of German foreign (cultural) policy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.

Lauriane Simony is an associate professor at the Faculty of International and Intercultural Studies at CY Cergy Paris Université in France and is part of the AGORA research team. Her doctoral research focused on the British Council in post-independence Burma, and issues of cultural diplomacy both in the context of the decolonisation of the British Empire and of the Cold War. During her Ph.D., she was awarded a research grant by the English Studies Society in France to conduct research at the National Archives in Myanmar in 2019. Since completing her Ph.D. in 2020, she has continued focusing on the United Kingdom’s soft power, cultural strategies and propaganda in the second half of the 20th century. As a musician and member of a symphonic orchestra herself, she is now investigating the role of British orchestras and the importance of classical music diplomacy in the global Cold War.

Marina is an international historian and scholar of International Relations specialising in the twentieth century. After serving as Head of History and Politics at the London School of Economics’ new European campuses, she returned to Oxford with a European Union Horizon research grant, having previously completed her doctorate there. She has published extensively, most recently in International History Review, Journal of Cold War Studies, Global Studies Quarterly, and Contemporary European History. Her work on cultural diplomacy—along with research on transatlantic food aid and cultural diplomacy in Austria and the early Cold War—earned her the Bulletin of Spanish Studies Best Article of the Year (2021) for her study of the British Council in Spain during WWII. She is secretary of the German History Society and serves on the board of the Society for the History of War. She also plays an active role in cultural diplomacy as Head of Scholarships Trustee of the British-Spanish Society, a charity that has promoted cultural and educational ties between Britain and Spain for over a century.

Lara works as an associate professor at the Lyon 3 University. She holds a PhD in Anglophone Studies, specialising in British civilisation and Irish studies. Her work focuses on cultural policy and foreign cultural policy in the British Isles, and more specifically on the model of the Arts Council. She is the author of The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (1943-2016), published in 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan. She is a member of the Institut d'Études Transtextuelles et Transculturelles (IETT).

Elisabet is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège (Belgium). She holds a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from KU Leuven and in Humanities and Communication from the Open University of Catalonia. Her doctoral research focused on the language and translation policies implemented by the League of Nations and the Organization of Intellectual Cooperation (1922-1946), that she reconstructed drawing on archival materials analyzed through both close and distant reading methodologies. She has previously served as a lecturer in Catalan Studies at the University of Bologna and has worked for Institut Ramon Llull, the public organization dedicated to promoting Catalan culture abroad. Her research interests encompass literature and nation-building, the historical sociology of translation, and the application of digital humanities to translation studies. 

Frederik is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Nordic Humanities Centre at Copenhagen University. He has recently published National Socialist Cultural Diplomacy: Culture, Politics, and Comradeship at the German-Nordic Writers’ House, 1934-1939 on Routledge. Other publications include ‘Three Settings for German-Nordic Cultural Diplomacy: Nordic Writers, the deutch-nordische Schriftstellerhaus, National Socialist Cultural Diplomacy in Interwar Scandinavia. The German-Nordic Writers’ House in Popular Culture,” with Stefan Nygård in National Identities, and National Socialist Internationalism’ in Diplomatica and ‘From Nordic Romanticism to Nordic Modernity: Danish Tourist Brochures in Nazi Germany, 1929–39’ in Journal for Contemporary History. In May 2026, he will take up a Marie Curie fellowship to explore how Scandinavian-speaking writers engaged cultural diplomatic initiatives from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union from 1933 through the Second World War.

Itzel holds a PhD in History and an MSc in International Relations from the University of Essex and a BA in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She has been Postdoctoral Fellow at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad Iberoamericana, Freie Universität Berlin and Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. She specialises in the history of Mexico’s international relations, cultural and public diplomacy, and women in diplomacy. She is part of the Mexican National System of Researchers (Level 1) and currently teaches at Universidad Iberoamericana and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Kristian is an assistant professor in Art History at the University of Copenhagen. His research concerns art exhibitions, cultural diplomacy and different conceptions of art in the cold war era in Northern Europe and their reception today, currently through the research projects Exhibiting Across the Iron Curtain: The Forgotten Trail of Danish artists exhibiting in the context of state socialism, 1955-1985 (2021-2025) and 1989: Changing Europe? Contemporary History as Cultural Heritage task for the Art Museums (2025-2028) in collaboration with Malmö Konstmuseum and The University of Copenhagen. 

Natacha is an Independent Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, Argentina (CONICET), where she currently co-directs the Humanities and Social Sciences Institute (IHUCSO). She holds professorships in Contemporary European and American History at the Faculty of Humanities of the Universidad Nacional del Littoral and in Contemporary Social History at the Faculty of Political Science and International Relations of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario. She is a member of the editorial team of the academic journal Estudios Sociales del Estado (IDES) and co-director of Estudios Sociales (UNL). She has been a guest researcher and lecturer at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, the University of Strasbourg, Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg, Laboratoire Mondes Américains/CNRS/EHESS, the University of the Americas Puebla/CONACyT, and the University of Brasília, among others. She was part of the DEA programme (2024/2025) of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme / EHESS, France. She has published numerous articles in indexed journals, books, and book chapters, primarily on the social studies of the state, its knowledge, and the phenomena of transnational circulation of knowledge, as well as the relations between politics, academia, and public life. 

Daniele is a research fellow and subject-matter expert in the history of the international system at the Department of Political Science of the University of Siena, and for about ten years he has also worked as a freelance journalist and political analyst. He earned his PhD, cum laude and with the title of Doctor Europaeus, from the Universities of Florence and Siena in U.S. history and international relations. He has completed three visiting PhD programs in Paris (UPEC, Collège de France, Panthéon-Assas), a city where he lived for about two and a half years and where he also undertook an Erasmus Traineeship for his thesis at Sorbonne IV. His research interests include political history and mentalities, propaganda and influence practices, military employment, and police militarization. In 2018, he co-founded the news site L’Eclettico.

Maija is an art historian specialising in exhibition history, the intersections of art, politics, and power, and the role of exhibitions in cultural diplomacy, with expertise in Cold War-era art exhibition diplomacy. Her doctoral dissertation (2019) examined Kunsthalle Helsinki’s exhibitions as politically embedded practices shaping Finnish art and its institutional context. In 2021–2024, she conducted research on Cold War cultural diplomacy and art exhibition exchange in Finland, including projects at the University of Turku and a Wihuri Foundation–funded individual fellowship. Currently, Koskinen is an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki (2025–2029), leading the project Art in Motion: Reframing European Cold War Art Exhibition Diplomacy.   

Costanza graduated in Contemporary History at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", where she later obtained her doctorate, after a period of study in Berlin as a visiting student at the Freie University. Her research, dedicated to the memory of reunification and peaceful revolution in Germany, is published under the title Rivoluzione pacifica e Unità. Celebrazioni e culture della memoria in Germania 1990-2015 (Viella, 2019).  Between 2021 and 2023 she was a research fellow at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici in Rome, with a project on cultural relations between Italy and the German Democratic Republic. Then she was a research fellow at the Free University of Bolzano, where she worked on a project dedicated to the relations between Italian and German nationalists in the period between the two world wars. She is currently research fellow at the University of Trieste, where she is working on Italian cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, focusing on the German case. Her main research interests are the history of contemporary Germany; questions of public memory, especially after '89; the cultural history of the Cold War.