Stella Ghervas joins UCLA as the Eugen Weber Chair in Modern European History from Newcastle University in the UK, where she was Professor of Russian History. She has held teaching, research and visiting positions in Australia, France, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her main interests are in intellectual and international history of modern Europe, with special reference to the history of peace and peace-making, and in Russia’s intellectual and maritime history. She is the author or editor of six books, most notably Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte Alliance (2008), which won the Guizot Prize from the Académie Française, A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment (co-ed., 2020), and Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (2021), which won the 2023 Laura Shannon Prize. She is now working on a new book Calming the Waters? A New History of the Black Sea, 1774-1920s, and an anthology of essential texts on peace from the Antiquity to the present day.

Elizabeth O’Brien is an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine and of Latin America. Her book, Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940, is forthcoming with The University of North Carolina Press in fall 2023. Her research has been funded by grants from ACLS/Mellon, NEH, Fulbright, and NSF, and has been published in The Lancet, Endeavour, The Washington Post, The Journal of Women’s History, Women’s History Review, and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. She was recently an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.