Kirsti Mathiesen Hjemdahl
holds a Dr. Art and a post.doc within Ethnology from the University of Bergen, Norway. Her doctoral thesis on Nordic literary theme parks, explored children’s culture from several contexts and through different research methods. After the dissemination, Hjemdahl established a firm and cooperated with one of the theme parks establishing a children’s cultural festival.
Hjemdahl’s post.doc was a study of political places in change in Croatia and South-Africa. She had a particular focus on post-socialism in Tito’s birthplace of Kumrovec and on post-apartheid at Robben Island outside of Cape Town. In Croatia, Hjemdahl leads a team of students and researchers from the University of Zagreb together with Nevena Skrbic Alempijevic in a multi-sited study of Day of Youth. This co-work results in several publications.
From mid - 2000 Hjemdahl leads a department of culture and creative industries at a regional research institute in the South of Norway, Agderforskning AS. Most of the research and innovation projects Hjemdahl carried out the next 15 years were so-called user-driven research projects, with partners from both within and outside of academia.
All this time, Hjemdahl has positioned several boards. When being the research leader of Innovation at the Norwegian research centre NORCE AS and Professor II in Ethnology at the University of Agder, she decided to leave academy in 2019.
Hjemdahl is now CEO of Cultiva in Kristiansand, a foundation with a capital base of 200 million Euro and the purpose to secure work and good living conditions trough the means of art, culture, creativity, and knowledge. She is also a board member of the Norwegian Research Council.
Nivedita Menon
Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, holds a PhD in Political Science from Delhi University on Rights, Law and the Women’s Movement in India. Her research interests and the areas in which she has published extensively include research papers in Indian and international journals. Books (Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (2004); and (co-written) Power and Contestation: India after 1989 (2007/2nd Edition 2014); two edited volumes Gender and Politics in India (1999) and Sexualities (2007); and a co-edited book Critical Studies in Politics Exploring Sites, Selves, Power (2013).
Menon is a regular commentator on contemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.online (of which she is one of the founders), and active in democratic politics in India. She also has translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English, and from Malayalam into Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for translation instituted by Katha.
Snježana Koren
Head of Chair for History Didactics at the History Department of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. She holds a PhD in modern and contemporary history from the same university. She worked for a number of years as a history teacher and teacher trainer. At the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, she teaches courses in history didactics and modern and contemporary history. Her research interests and the areas in which she has published extensively include the politics of history and memory in socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states, history of historiography and history education, comparative analysis of history textbooks and curricula, initial teacher training in Europe, intercultural education etc. Since 1999 she has been involved in several international and Croatia-based projects dealing with the above-mentioned topics. In 2015–2018 she was the head of the working group for making a proposal of the new history curriculum in Croatia.
Debora Spini
currently teaching at New York University Shanghai. In the past, she taught at New York University in Florence and Syracuse University in Florence. Spini has been adjunct faculty at the School of Political Sciences in Florence, where she taught Philosophy of Social Sciences for the Master degree in Sociology and Social Philosophy, as well as Philosophy of the Public Sphere for the Master Degree in Sociology and Social Research. Spini’s early research interests focused of Protestant theology and contractualist political thought. Spini’s current research focuses on religious groups in the public sphere, secularisation/post secularisation, monotheism and violence, and the rise of xenophobic populism with a focus on gender issues. Later on her interests focused on the transformations of the public sphere in the global age. She has also worked on the role of religious groups in the public sphere, secularisation and post secularisation as well as on the birth of religious tolerance.
Spini has also worked on gender based violence; on these topics she has organised various dialogues for New York University in Florence, setting up a wide network of scholars and activists. At the moment she is working on the connection between gender based violence and migration.
Paul Mojzes
Professor Emeritus of religious studies at Rosemont College, where he used to be also the Provost and Academic Dean. He was interim director of the Gratz College Holocaust and Genocide Studies doctoral program and is adjunct professor. He studied at Belgrade University Law School, received the A.B. degree from Florida Southern College and Ph.D. degree from Boston University. He was the co-editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, and is the founder and editor of Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe. Author of six and the editor of seventeen books, he has written over 100 articles and chapters in books. Among his recent books are Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century; Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious Warfare in the Balkans, Religious Liberty in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and edited Religion and War in Bosnia and North American Churches and the Cold War.
Gjylbehare Bella Murati 
Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Diplomatic Law at Haxhi Zeka University, Kosovo. She holds a PhD in Law from Ghent University, Belgium, LL.M. from Essex University in United Kingdom and B.A in Law from Universities of Prishtina, Kosovo, and Utrecht, the Netherlands. Previously, she was an associate postdoctoral research fellow at Human Rights Centre in Ghent, Belgium as well as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. In addition she was a visiting lecturer at European inter-university center for Human Rights and Democratization in Venice Lido, Italy, Prior to her academic career she worked for various organizations both national and international. Her areas of expertise are human rights and rule of law in post-conflict societies, state building, accountability of international organizations and transitional justice.
Nicola Colbran
holds a Masters in Public International Law (cum laude) from Leiden University, the Netherlands, a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) and Bachelor of Asian Studies (Indonesian) (Hons) from the Australian National University and also studied law for 18 months at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia. She has written three theses on Indonesian law, legal education, human rights and international criminal law. She is currently a National Judicial Registrar with the Federal Court of Australia and works across the Court’s jurisdictions, including in the native title jurisdiction which determines the rights and interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to land and waters that derive from their traditional law and custom. Nicola has extensive experience studying and working in the law, human rights, aid and development. She has worked at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights in the Indonesia Program, where she led work primarily related to economic social and cultural rights, indigenous peoples’ rights and the administration of justice in Indonesia. She supported capacity building activities to Indonesian audiences (government, the national human rights institution, NGOs, community and indigenous leaders, as well as academia). Subsequently, Nicola was the Director of the Australia Indonesia Partnership for Justice, the Australian government’s flagship law and justice program designed to realise rights through the strengthening of Indonesian legal institutions and NGOs active in the field of law and justice. Nicola has also been a senior associate at a large corporate law firm where she specialised in mergers and acquisitions, and domestic and international banking and finance work.
Nicola is a nationally accredited mediator and has mediated hundreds of disputes on topics including human rights and native title. Nicola has published widely in human rights, aid and development and has presented at international conferences on these topics
Moncef Khaddar
Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations at Cyprus International University, holds PhD in Political Science from Sorbonne, Paris. In 1985-86 Dr. Khaddar was a Fulbright Research Associate for one year at the Center of Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley. In the 1989 academic year, he was the Social Science Research Council Fellowship recipient at Columbia University, New York.
He has taught in France, Tunisia, USA, and Egypt (AUC). His article on “Nationalist ruling parties, national governments ideologies, partisans, and statesmen: human rights offenders and human rights defenders in the North African post-colonial states and societies” was published in The Journal of North African Studies. Most recently, a paper titled “New and old ‘Authoritarianism’: context and strategy of ‘transition’ from one form to another, the case of Tunisia and the perpetuation of oligarchic form of governance beyond the binary ‘Democratic’/’Authoritarian’” was presented at the Lund University workshop on “What’s New in New Authoritarianism?”.
Khaddar’s research focuses mostly on Statesmen and Ideologies: Discourses and Practices in the Middle East and North Africa; state/society interaction and international human rights. These latter are lately explored and approached with a particular focus on vulnerable groups. The everlasting attempts at a bottom-up radical change in the MENA, mainly initiated by popular movements, constitute the theme of his current comparative research project centered on the Tunisian case.
Zrinka Štimac
studied religion and English language, literature and culture at Leibniz University Hanover and the University of Sarajevo. Her academic career commenced at the Centre for Religious Studies and the Study of Religion Seminar at the University of Münster. She subsequently received a research grant from the German Research Foundation’s (DFG) graduate school on South-East Europe at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and completed her doctorate in 2010 with a thesis on ‘Religion und Bildung in Bosnien und Herzegowina. Konzepte und Strategien religiöser und säkularer Deutungsträger nach 1994’ (Religion and Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Concepts and Strategies of Religious and Secular Stakeholders since 1994). She then moved to Bielefeld University where she worked on the DFG research project ‘The Ethos of Religious Peace Builders’ and explored the habitus of collective religious actors. She later took charge of teaching and administration for the discipline of religion at the same institution.
Among Dr Štimac's voluntary activities in the field of education are the design and realisation of the ‘Suitcase of Religion’ (Religionskoffer) project for multi-disciplinary education in schools (Hanover/Münster, 2002–4), as well as work for the education and culture department of the German Commission for UNESCO in Bonn. From 2004 to 2009 she served as general secretary of the European Association on World Religions in Education.
Dr Štimac joined the GEI as a researcher in April 2013 and coordinates the research field ‘Religious Change and Societal Diversity’. Her focuses include religious diversity and educational media, global educational discourses, religion and politics.
Chaoyan Dong
has been working in healthcare education in Singapore since 2013, first at the Centre for Medical Education of National University of Singapore (NUS), and recently at Sengkang General Hospital. Her responsibilities include healthcare education management, continuing professional development, and education research. Before moving to Singapore 2013, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at New York University School of Medicine, where her focus was simulation-based medical education, drawing from her background in cognitive science, education technology, and psychology. She earned a PhD in Educational Communication & Technology from New York University, USA. Chaoyan research interests focused on how to best help people learn, how to translate research findings to teaching practice, and how to use evidence from research and practice to help education policy making.
Eva Kovacevic
educated at University of Zagreb and Ruhr University Bochum, where she obtained her PHD in low temperature plasmas for astro-analogs. Habilitation at University of Orleans in the field of reactive plasmas. Works at GREMI since 2008 (start with Heinrich Hertz Fellowship, followed by Principal investigator, task-leader or participant in different types of projects on regional, national and international level : APR IA and IR, ARD, ANRs, in Germany : participant in one 1 SFB, simple DFG projects, and part of FET OPEN HORIZON 2020 projects. Expert and panel member for national and international foundations (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, USA, ERC...), member of executive board of European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division ; membre de CED CFVU et CAC (Conseil Academic d'Université d'orleans). Editor or member of editorial boards at EPJD (Springer, topical and review Editor), EpL (IOP), CPP (Wiley).
Indira Aslanova
Assistant professor at the UNESCO Chair of World Culture and Religions, Kyrgyz Russian Slavic University (KRSU), and a chairman of the Research Center for Religious Studies, a national think tank focused on studying the religious situation in Kyrgyzstan. She graduated from KRSU and also studied in Egypt, USA, Norway, Indonesia and Germany. She is a member of the Public Council on under the Penalty Service of the Kyrgyz Republic. Her current professional interests focuses on studying religious freedom in Kyrgyzstan, violent extremism, religious minorities, state policy in the religious sphere, conflict management and peacebuilding. Mrs. Aslanova has been an author and co-author for over 20 guidebooks, articles and policy papers highlighting state strategy on preventing violent extremism in the Kyrgyz Republic; regulations over burial practices of believers; the State Concept on reforming religious studies education in the Kyrgyz Republic; freedom of religions and administration of justice in the Kyrgyz Republic, as well as history and interfaith science and many more. Worked as an expert for various local and international organizations such as UNODC, UNDP, OSCE, SFCG, etc.