Josef Petráň (1930-2017) was a professor of Czech history at Charles University, Prague, and hailed as one of the most important Czech historians of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Lydia Petráňová is a member of the Department of Historical Ethnology at the Czech Academy of Sciences. She also lectures at both Charles University and J. E. Purkyně University. Ian Finlay Stone is a translator of Czech based in Basel, Switzerland.