Peter Pirker holds a PhD in history and a MA in Political Science from the University of Vienna. He is lecturer at the Department of Goverment, University of Vienna and the Department of History at the Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt. From 2014 to 2016 he will be co-principal investigator of the project Politics of remembrance and the transition of public spaces. A political and social analysis of Vienna, 1995-2015 at the University of Vienna. In 2012 he was Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His research interests include transnational resistance, intelligence and exile during National Socialism, post-war Central Europe, politics of history. Currently he is working on the project Democratic Resistance which investigates the journalistic, intelligence and political activities of the Anglo-American correspondent G.E.R. Gedye in Central Europe from 1925 to 1960.

He has published four monographs, among them Subversion deutscher Herrschaft. Der britische Kriegsgeheimdienst SOE und Österreich (Vienna University Press, 2012), Ich war mit Freuden dabei. Der KZ-Arzt Sigbert Ramsauer (with Lisa Rettl, Milena, 2010) and co-edited six volumes on regional and local National Socialist rule in Austria, biographies of victims of Nazism, Wehrmacht deserters, exiles and members of the resistance, most recently Wehrmachtsjustiz. Kontext, Praxis, Nachwirkungen (Braumüller Verlag, 2011).

Ian Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and a Fellow of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University. He grew up in Britain and studied at Birmingham and Cambridge Universities before moving to the University of Chicago in 1987 and on to Stanford University in 1995. He directed Stanford’s archaeological excavations at Monte Polizzo in Sicily between 2000 and 2007 and has served at Stanford as Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Sciences, Chair of the Classics department, and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center and Social Science History Institute. He has served as a contributing editor at Stratfor, the Roman Professor of International Studies at the LSE, the Australian Army's Professor of Future Land Warfare, and as a member of the Max Planck Institute's Scientific Advisory Board. In 2012 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

He has published thirteen books and more than a hundred essays in scholarly journals and newspapers. His book Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What they Reveal About the Future (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2010) won three literary awards, was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Nature, and the London Evening Standard, and has been translated into fourteen languages. Foreign Policy magazine ranked it number 2 among the books global thinkers were reading in 2011. His most recent book, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Values Evolve, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015. His next book looks at Britain's relations with Europe and the wider world--all the way back to 6000 BC, when rising sea levels physically separated the British Isles from the European continent.