Norman Davies first visited Poland in March 1962, when he was still a student in his final year at Oxford. Fascinated by what he learned, and by what the authorities did not want him to learn, he made the study of Polish history the starting point of his academic career. His early books – White Eagle, Red Star: the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20, (1972), God's Playground: a history of Poland (1981), and Heart of Europe: the past in Poland's present (1984) – were banned by the censorship of the Soviet Block and long unavailable to Polish readers. As a successful historian writing in English, however, he rapidly gained a worldwide readership and devoted himself to informing the world about Poland. His books have been translated into over thirty languages including Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, German, Italian, and French. Over the years, Prof. Davies received many honors and distinctions. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy (1997) and was awarded Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest order.

Frank E. Sysyn is director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), professor in the Department of History, Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, and editor in chief of the Hrushevsky Translation Project, the English translation of the multi-volume History of Ukraine-Rus' (12 volumes ). He is head of the executive committee of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) at CIUS, a member of the editorial board of Harvard Ukrainian Studies and East-West: A Journal of Ukrainian Studies, and head of the advisory board of the Ukrainian Program at the Harriman Institute. He has taught at the University of Alberta, Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University, and other institutions.

A specialist in East-Central European history, he is the author of Between Poland and Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600-1653 (1985), Mykhailo Hrushevsky: Historian and National Awakener (2001), and studies on the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Ukrainian historiography, early modern Ukrainian political culture, modern Ukrainian religious history, and the Holodomor. He is also coauthor with Serhii Plokhy of Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (2003) and co-editor with Martin Schulze Wessel of Religion, Nation, and Secularization in Ukraine (2015). He is co-editor with Andrea Graziosi of Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines (2016) and the recently published Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept (2022). He is editor in chief of three-volume collected work of Father Mykhailo Zubryts'kyi: Vol. 1 Scholarly Works (2013) and Vol. 2 Materials toward a Biography (2016)Vol.3 Newspaper Articles, Ethnographic Works, and Archival Materials (2019).