Ali Anooshahr
is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His books include Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s) (Oxford University Press, January 2025); The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature, edited with Ebba Koch (The Marg Foundation, March 2019); Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (Oxford, 2018); and The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009). His research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation, among others.
Elizabeth Arkush
is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Comparative Center for Archaeology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the Society for American Archaeology Scholarly Book Award for Hillforts of the Ancient Andes (2011). Her most recent book is War, Spectacle and Politics in the Ancient Andes (2022, Cambridge University Press). Her field research in southern Peru has focused on late pre-Columbian hillfort settlements and related themes of conflict and social organization.
David S. Bachrach
is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of New Hampshire and specializes in the military and administrative history of the Carolingian Empire, the early medieval German kingdom, and the kingdom of England in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. His recent publications include The Foundations of Royal Power in Early Medieval Germany: Material Resources and Governmental Administration in a Carolingian Successor State (2022); Bruno of Merseburg: The Saxon War (2022) with Bernard S. Bachrach; and forthcoming Warfare in the Global Middle Ages, also with Bernard S. Bachrach.
Martin Clauss
is Professor for the History of Europa in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period at the Technical University of Chemnitz. He specialises on the history of Medieval war and warfare with a focus on cultural history. His interest include the history of defeat or the sound of medieval war.
is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Research Associate in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. He has conducted archaeological and archival research in the Andes since 1996, supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and various private organizations. His work, which investigates Inca society before and after the European invasion, has appeared in authored and edited books, as well as in dozens of journal articles and book chapters.
Philip Dwyer
is Emeritus Professor of History and founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has published 18 books and edited books, as well as over 60 journal articles and chapters in edited collections. He is currently writing a global history of violence.
Beatrice Forbes Manz
is Tufts University Professor of History Emerita and author of three books: The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Nomads in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her major research interest lies in the Turco-Mongolian rule in Iran and the relationship between pastoral nomads and settled populations during the Mongol and post-Mongol periods.
Karl F. Friday
(PhD 1989, Stanford University) is Professor Emeritus in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Saitama University, and at the University of Georgia. A specialist in the Heian and Kamakura periods, his publications include Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (Stanford University Press, 1992), Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima Shinryū & Samurai Martial Culture (University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (Routledge, 2004), The First Samurai: The Life & Legend of the Warrior Rebel Taira Masakado (Wiley, 2008), Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850 (Westview, 2012), and numerous shorter works.
Lennart Gilhaus
(PhD 2015, University of Bonn) is Assistant Professor (“Junior Professor”) of Ancient History with a Special Focus on Medality and Digitality at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He has worked extensively on Ancient North
Hendrik Hess
has been research fellow at the University of Bonn in the Department of Medieval History of the Institute of Historical Science since 2016. He studied Medieval and Modern History, Modern German Literature, Media Studies and Medieval and Modern Languages at the Universities of Bonn and Oxford. From 2012 to 2016 he held a doctoral scholarship from the “Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.” He finished his doctorate in 2018 [published as Das Selbstverständnis der gallorömischen Oberschicht. Übergang, Hybridität und Latenz im historischen Diskursraum von Sidonius Apollinaris bis Gregor von Tours [Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 111], Berlin/Boston 2019). Currently he is working on his habilitation project concerning “Maskulinität(en) im Spätmittelalter—Konstruktionen der Männlichkeit des römisch-deutschen Herrschers im 14. Jahrhundert.”
Jürgen Paul
(PhD, Hamburg 1989; Habilitation, Hamburg 1993) is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg). Since 2016, he is a member of the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Hamburg. He specializes in the medieval and early modern history of Iran and Muslim Central Asia, and has published widely on social history of these regions, including the importance of non-specialists (both nomadic and sedentary-urban) in warfare.
Stefanie Rüther
studied history and German philology at the University of Münster and was awarded her doctorate in 2000 for her thesis on the representation of the Lübecker councilors in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral researcher as part of the SFB 496 “Symbolic Communication and Social Value Systems,” (2000–2008) and, since 2008, the head of a PhD group within the Graduate School of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics.” Since 2015, she has been working as a research coordinator for the MPI for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt a. M. Her research focuses on the history of conflict, violence, and war and security production in the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods.
is Assistant Professor and Director of the Skeletal and Environmental Isotope Laboratory (SEIL) in the Department of Anthropology and Heritage Studies at the University of California, Merced. She also co-directs the Lower Majes Valley Archaeological Project (Arequipa, Peru) and contributes to bioarchaeological and archaeometric research at pre-Hispanic and early colonial sites in Latin America and the Southeastern United States. Scaffidi uses bioarchaeological, isotopic, paleopathological, and geospatial analyses to investigate how interactions between human rituals, landscapes, and natural resources impact human health and social outcomes throughout their life courses and through deep time.
Daniel F. Schley
is a research fellow in the SNSF project “Time and Emotion” at the University of Zurich. He graduated from Hamburg University in 2007 and received his PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in 2013 with a thesis on sacred kingship in medieval Japan. Between 2017 and 2024 he was an Assistant Professor (“Juniorprofessor”) for Japanese Premodern History in the Department of Japanese and Korean Studies at Bonn University. He also participated in the DFG (German Research Foundation) funded Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1167 on “Macht und Herrschaft—premodern Configurations from a transregional Perspective.” His research focusses on medieval Japanese kingship, historiography and modern philosophy of history.