Dr. Madeleine Tulip (Scherer) currently works as a Course Manager/ Lecturer at Askham Bryan University Centre York, and as an Associate Lecturer at Warwick University, where she previously completed her Ph.D. as well as an Early Career Fellowship. Her specialisation is classical reception in modern and contemporary literature, wherein she takes a memory-centred approach to understanding the role and continuing importance of GraecoRoman antiquity in the West. Her first monograph, Classical Memories: The Underworld in the Twentieth Century, has been contracted and will be published with DeGruyter’s Media and Cultural Memory Series in September 2021, and in collaboration with Prof. Rachel Falconer she has published an edited collection entitled A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature with Routledge (published under: Madeleine Scherer). 

Jakob Schneider is currently associated with the Department of Archaeology of the Humboldt University Berlin, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Institute for African Studies and Egyptology at the University of Cologne. He is currently writing his Ph.D. on memory processes in Ancient Egypt, uncovering common ground between Egyptological approaches to ancient Egyptian cultural memory and contemporary memory studies. His work draws on archaeological theory and research on the reception of ancient Egypt all the way from antiquity to today. One of Schneider’s notable publications is his article Tiefe Brunnen und kein Ende: Notizen zur Rezeption und Wandlung der Gedächtnistheorie (Aegyptiaca – Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt, 2020) in which he contrasted the reception of Memory Theory in Egyptology and Memory Studies. In addition, he took the opportunity to present his research about memory works in ancient Egypt during several international conferences. He and Dr. Tulip have already collaborated on the edited collection A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature, wherein he published the first chapter on The Even Longer Descent: Notes on Genesis and Development of Ancient Egyptian Underworld Conceptions.

Dr. habil. Aaron Schmitt currently works as PostDoc researcher at the University of Freiburg. He specialized on Ancient Mesopotamian cultures form the 3rd until the 1st millennium BC. In his habilitation thesis Schmitt investigated cultural memory in Ancient Mesopotamian cultures applying methods and approaches from the field of Memory Studies. The main objective of his work was to demonstrate that the notion of a monolithic and unchanging reception of the past in Ancient Mesopotamian societies is incompatible with the evidence at hand. In fact, the way in which Ancient Mesopotamian societies referred to and made of use of the(ir) past to engage with challenges of their resent(s) differed markedly depending on the context. As an archaeologist, Schmitt focusses on the relevant material culture but his training in Assyriology enables him to include the written sources in this research. Combining the two, he was able to gain insights into various aspects of cultural memories in Ancient Mesopotamia in unprecedented depth and breadth. Apart from this habilitation thesis, he published several papers on this topic and is one the few specialists for Memory Studies within Ancient Near Eastern studies.