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Eneken Laanes is the professor of comparative literature and the Head of the research project Memory and Environment: (2025–2029, Estonian Research Council). Her research deals with transnational literature, film, art and memory in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Laanes has her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Tartu. She has been a Juris Padegs Research Fellow at Yale University (2013–2014) and Kone Fellow at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2019). 
Laanes’s research interests include cultural memory, trauma, critical theory and cultural analysis, contemporary literature, theories of subjectivity, autobiography and self-writing, world literature, transnational literature and multilingualism, visual history. See her research profile .

Mari Laaniste is a researcher studying various forms of visual and audiovisual culture: film, animation, comics, cartoons and the interrelations of words and images in popular culture. She defended a MA (2002) degree at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and has since published research mostly on Estonian animation and fiction film.

Her PhD dissertation focuses on Priit Pärn’s Soviet-era works. She teaches classes on visual culture and film at the Estonian Academy of Arts and the University of Tallinn, has edited books and organized conferences in the ongoing series “Studies in Contemporary Culture” as well as curated comics exhibitions, published some fiction and is also active as a critic.

Daniele Monticelli is the professor of italian studies and semiotics. He has studied and researched in Italy, Germany, Estonia, the US and teaches subjects in contemporary Italian history, society and politics, philosophy of language, comparative literature and research seminars. 

His research is characterized by a wide and interdisciplinary range of interests which include the relations between translation and ideology particularly under totalitarian rule and censorship, semiotic theory and poststructuralism, the literary construction of affects, passions and cognition, contemporary critical theory with particular focus on the political thought of Agamben, Badiou and Rancière. He has authored literary and essayistic translations from Estonian into Italian and actively contributes to the cultural and political debate in the Estonian media and society.

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Julia Kuznetski (Tofantšuk) is the Professor of English at the School of Humanities at TLU. She has taught courses on literature and literary theory (World Literature, British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, 20th-21st-century British Literature, British Women Writers of the 20th-21st Century, 19th-century British Literature, 19th-century British Art, British and American Art in the 20th-21st Century, etc.), as well as practical English (English C2, Analysis of Academic Texts, Contemporary English, etc.), at BA, MA and PhD level. She has contributed to study programme development on all academic levels and is a member of several professional organisations (ESSE, FINSSE, MLA, ASLE, KAJAK, ENUT) and Advisory Board member of Lexington Books Ecocritical Theory and Practice series.

Julia Kuznetski’s PhD thesis (2007) was on construction of identity in the fiction of contemporary British women writers, for example, Eva Figes, Jeanette Winterson and Meera Syal. She has published articles, book chapters (Routledge, Peter Lang WV, Palgrave Macmillan) and delivered conference papers on gender and identity, transnational feminism, postcolonial and diaspora studies, ecocriticism and ecofeminism, which are her main research interests.

Andres Kurg is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Art History,  in Tallinn. His research explores the architecture and design of the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to technological transformations and changes in everyday life as well as its intersections with alternative art practices.

He studied art history at the Estonian Academy of Arts and architectural history at University College London. He has published articles in AA Files, ArtMargins, Journal of Architecture, Home Cultures and contributed to many collected volumes and exhibition catalogues. In 2008 he co-edited Environment, Projects, Concepts: Architects of the Tallinn School 1972-1985. He recently co-curated Our Metamorphic Futures. Design, Technical Aesthetics and Experimental Architecture in the Soviet Union 1960–1980 in Vilnius National Gallery of Art and Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design (2011–12), a project funded by a grant from the EU Culture programme. In 2015 he was a Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; in Spring 2017 he was Visiting Senior Researcher in European Studies at the MacMillan Center, Yale University, New Haven.

Dr (Emilia) Diana Popa is a film scholar and researcher at Tallinn University. Diana started working at Tallinn University in 2020 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant project entitled: “Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena”. Previously, she was an ERC postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh part of the “Illuminating the ‘Grey Zone’: Addressing Complex Complicity in Human Rights Violations” project (2018-2020). She received her PhD in Film Studies from the University of St Andrews, Scotland (2018) with a thesis on the specificity of the aesthetics of slowness in contemporary (post 2000) Romanian cinema. Since then, Diana developed an interdisciplinary research agenda situated at the intersection of audio-visual archives, film and cultural memory studies. In her work, she examines how audiovisual media remediate the Eastern European past and memory in local, regional and transnational contexts. Her articles have been published in Slavic & Eastern European Journal; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Journal of European Studies and Short Film Studies.