Professor Marci Shore made Canadian headlines when, after 19 years at Yale University, she left her position as Professor of History to return to Toronto and teach at the Munk School.

Dr. Shore’s research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth- and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2004 she has been a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. In spring 2025 she guest curated, together with Oksana Forostyna, the Kyiv Book Arsenal with the theme “Everything is Translation.” She is the translator of Michał Głowiński’s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism,1918-1968 and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in March 2024. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Eurozine, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Her essay “With Shestov in Ukraine” will appear in The Best American Essays 2026. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her book project about phenomenology in Central Europe; the book is forthcoming in 2028 under the title “The Truth-Seekers.”

Robert Steiner is the Director of the Fellowship in Journalism and Health Impact Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto.

He began his career as a global finance correspondent for The Wall Street Journal with postings in New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won two Overseas Press Club awards and the Inter-American Press Association Award.

He has served as a business strategy executive for Bell Globemedia, parent of the Globe and Mail and CTV. Rob was the Assistant Vice President of the University of Toronto in charge of Strategic Communications.

Prof. Steiner has also held senior health policy positions in Canada. In 2021-22, he served as communications director for the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table. In 2010 he ran communications for Public Health Ontario. In 2003-4, he advised the Prime Minister’s Office and the federal Cabinet on the creation of the Public Health Agency of Canada, after serving as health policy advisor and principal speechwriter for Hon. Paul Martin during his successful campaign to be Prime Minister. During the 2000 federal election, Mr. Steiner managed the Liberal Party of Canada’s digital campaign, working for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.