Rob Citino is an award-winning military historian and scholar who has published 11 books, including The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945; The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943; Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942; and The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich. In 2021, he won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History for lifetime achievement in the field. Citino graduated magna cum laude with a BA in history from Ohio State University and earned his MA and PhD from Indiana University. He enjoys close ties with the US military establishment and has taught at the US Military Academy at West Point and the US Army War College. He was a professor of history at North Texas University, Lake Erie College, and Eastern Michigan University. Citino joined The National WWII Museum in 2016 as Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian and served as Executive Director of the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. Though he retired in 2023, he remains active in the Institute as a Distinguished Fellow. 

Yan Mann is an associate clinical professor of history and the program lead of the World War II Studies master’s degree program and the Holocaust & Genocide graduate certificate at Arizona State University. He is the co-editor of The Eastern Front: War, Myth, and Memory in which he authored the chapter “The Forgotten: Challenging Brezhnev's Cult of the Great Patriotic War.” Mann is also the author of chapters “Situating Stalin in the history of the Second World War” (The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia) and “Manufactured Memory: Crafting the Cult of the Great Patriotic War” (Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide). His research revolves around the relationship between individual and collective memory of the Great Patriotic War, the Stalin cult, censorship, propaganda, and the production of the war’s first official history during Khrushchev’s thaw. Mann specializes in World War II, the Soviet Union, and war and society.

Volker Benkert is an associate professor at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the impact of sudden regime change on biographies in 20th-century Germany and Europe. He graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Bonn and a doctorate from the University of Potsdam.

Kimberly Guise is the Assistant Director for Curatorial Services at The National WWII Museum. She holds a BA in German and Judaic studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She studied at the Universität Freiburg in Germany and holds a master’s in library and information science from Louisiana State University. Guise is fluent in German, reads Yiddish, and specializes in the American prisoner-of-war experience in World War II. As a curator with the Museum since 2008, she has facilitated the acquisition of thousands of artifacts and has curated several exhibitions, including Guests of the Third Reich: American POWs in Europe. 

Jason Dawsey is an assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University. He previously was a Research Historian at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, where he researched the service records of WWII veterans and wrote their biographies for family members. A native of Columbia, Mississippi, Dawsey received his PhD in 2013 from the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Beyond his research on World War II, his interests include the history of the European Left, debates about the impact of technology on modern life, and the history of Holocaust consciousness.

Sean Scanlon is a WWII Military Historian at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. He regularly writes for The National WWII Museum’s website, provides advice on historical content for new exhibits, hosts public events, and participates in the Museum’s education programs, including the Emerging Scholars Workshop, Faculty Seminar in WWII History, and the Normandy Academy program. Originally from Western Massachusetts, Scanlon received his BA in history and religious studies from Stonehill College and his MA and PhD in history from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. He previously was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, where he taught undergraduate courses in modern US history. A specialist in 20th-century US diplomatic, military, political, and religious history, Scanlon’s current research explores the history of New Orleans’s WWII-era Jewish community.