Aleida Assmann is a literary and cultural studies scholar. She studied English literature and Egyptology in Heidelberg and Tuebingen, was Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Konstanz from 1993 until 2014, and held numerous visiting professorships both in Germany and abroad. Together with her husband Jan Assmann, she received the Balzan Prize 2017 for their research on cultural memory and the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 2018. Her most recent publications are Formen des Vergessens (2016); Menschenrechte und Menschenpflichten: Schlüsselbegriffe für eine humane Gesellschaft (2018); and Der europäische Traum: Vier Lehren aus der Geschichte (2018).

Nikolai Axmacher studied philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and medicine at the Charité Berlin, where he earned his doctorate in 2005 at the Institute of Physiology. From 2004 until 2011, he was a clinical researcher at the Department for Epileptology at the University Hospital Bonn and in 2009 concluded his habilitation in cognitive neurosciences. Since 2011, he has directed an Emmy Noether group on epileptology and a junior scientist group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn. In 2014 he was appointed professor of neuropsychology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB). Nikolai Axmacher is an appointed member of the Memory Disorders Research Society, advisory board member of the Transfaculty Research Platform Molecular and Cognitive Neurosciences (MCN) at the University of Basel, and board member of the Research Department of Neuroscience at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.