Prof.dr. Kees Ribbens is endowed professor of Popular historical culture and War at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Since 2006 he is affiliated as a senior researcher at NIOD (Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies). Popular historical culture and public history in the broadest sense of the term are among his key interests. His interest includes both the history of the Second World War and the memories and representations of war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Ribbens is particularly intrigued by the medium of comics and graphic novels.

Prof.dr. Ann Rigney holds the chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht. She is an elected member of the Royal Dutch Academic of Sciences (KNAW) and of the Academia Europaea. Ever since her PhD thesis, published as The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (1990), she has been fascinated by the intersections between narrative, collective identity, and contestations of the past. She has published widely in the field of modern memory cultures, with projects both on the nineteenth century and on contemporary developments. She has also played an active role in cultural memory studies with a particular focus on issues relating to mediation and transnationalism. Her most recent research deals with the memory of protest.

Prof.dr. Jeroen Stumpel holds the chair of Iconography and Art Theory at the History Department of Utrecht University. His research focusses on Renaissance art with a special interest in artistic techniques. He is coordinator of the interdisciplinary research program ‘The Impact of Oil’ that traces the rich history of oil painting, and pays specific attention to the consequences of the use of oil media for the visual arts. In 2006 Stumpel received the Wissenschaftpreis of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung. In the academic year 2007/2008 he was visiting professor at Harvard. In his keynote lecture Stumpel will reflect on the question how the icon, as a strong visual representation, can be studied from the perspective of iconology. What can iconology contribute to the study of the icon as cultural model?

Prof. Ginette Vincendeau holds the chair of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her research focuses on French cinema, especially popular genres (thriller, film noir, comedy) and film celebrities. She has published widely on stardom in European and Hollywood film, with a special focus on the cinematic icon Brigitte Bardot. Ginette Vincendeau is a regular contributor to the international film magazine Sight & Sound, editor of The Encyclopedia of European Cinema (Cassell/BFI, 1995) and biographer of director Jean-Pierre Melville. Currently she is co-editing the book Paris in the cinema: Beyond the Flâneur that aims at offering a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen.