Prof. Dr. Achim Rabus is the current Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Rabus defended his PhD thesis on the language of East Slavic spiritual songs in 2008 and his Habilitationsschrift on Slavic language contact in 2014. Since 2009, Rabus has been a member of the Special Commission on the Computer- Supported Processing of Mediæval Slavonic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books to the International Committee of Slavists, and since 2018, the President of the Commission. His current research focuses on Slavic social dialectology, Handwritten Text Recognition, corpus and (digital) historical linguistics.

Walker Thompson read Russian and German as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, going on to complete his Master’s in Syriac Studies at Wolfson College in 2019. From 2019–2020, he was an Academic Assistant at the Slavic Institute of Heidelberg University. Since October 2020, he has been continuing his doctoral research on Epifanij Slavineckij’s lexicographical works as a DAAD-GSSP scholar at the Heidelberg Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HGGS). His teaching and research interests span a diverse range of topics including digital humanities, graphematics, language contact, early modern lexicography, the history of Church Slavonic, and Eastern Orthodox liturgics.