Maria Di Salvo is Professor of Slavic Philology at Milan State University. She studied Slavic languages at the University of Florence, specializing in Russian and Polish, then at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She published essays and translations of Russian Formalist criticism (Ju. N. Tynjanov, Formalismo e storia letteraria, Torino, Einaudi 1973, B. Tomaševskij, Teoria della letteratura, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1978, P.G.Bogatyrev, Il teatro delle marionette, Brescia, Grafo edizioni, l980) the history of Russian and Polish linguistics (J. Baudouin de Courtenay, N. Trutskoi), then mainly on the eighteenth century in Russia (parts of Storia della civiltà letteraria russa, ed. by M. Colucci and R. Picchio, vol. I, Torino, UTET, 1997). She has been professor of Russian Literature at the universities of Genoa and Pisa, then of Slavic Philology at the universities of Pavia and Milan.
Daniel H. Kaiser is Professor of History Emeritus at Grinnell College. Kaiser studied Russian history at the University of Chicago, specializing in pre-Petrine Russia, especially its legal and social institutions. He is the author of The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton, 1980), and translator and editor of The Laws of Rus’: Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries; editor of The Workers’ Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View From Below (Cambridge, 1987); and with Gary J. Marker editor of Reinterpreting Russian History 860-1860s (Oxford, 1994). He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Kaiser was a visitor at Darwin College, Cambridge, and has held visiting appointments at UCLA and Nanjing University, China.
Valerie Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her Ph.D. in Russian History from Stanford University in 1988. She is the author of Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Cornell, 2013), and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia, (Cornell, 2006), and editor of Witchcraft Casebook: Magic in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, 15th-21st Centuries, Russian History/Histoire russe vol. 40, nos. 3-4 (2013) (guest editor) and Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, with Joan Neuberger, (Yale, 2008), and with Robert H. Greene, Orthodox Russia: Studies in Belief and Practice (Penn State, 2003).