Marianne Hirsch is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. Her books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust; Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory and the co-edited volume Women Mobilizing Memory.

Leo Spitzer is the K. T. Vernon Professor of History Emeritus and Research Professor at Dartmouth College. He writes about individual and collective responses to colonialism and exclusion, Jewish refugee memory, trauma and transmission. His books include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism, Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation, and the co-edited Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present.

Hirsch and Spitzer have co-authored two books: Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020). They have also curated the current exhibit "School Photos and their Afterlives" (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College).