Stefanie Kühn studied Ancient History, French Philology and Modern Greek at the Freie Universität Berlin. She wrote her master’s thesis about the subject “Der Charakter einer Tyrannis: Polykrates von Samos”. In 2007 she received her Magistra Artium. Currently she is writing her doctoral thesis about the “Pythais Procession” and the construction of sacred space in Ancient Greece, within the TOPOI research group “Acts. Sacred Places – Sacred Landscapes” (C-III).

Friederike Fless is professor of Classical Archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has been director of the Excellence Cluster Topoi from October 2007 through February 2011. As of April 1, 2011, she was appointed President of the German Archeological Institute as the successor to Hans-Joachim Gehrke. Her current research focuses on the formation and transformation of the Roman frontier on the Crimea as well as the borders of the City of Rome and the walls of the city of Zeugma at the Euphrates.

Since 2003, Dominik Bonatz has served as a professor at the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. His academic career started early with doctoral research on Iron Age funerary monuments in the Syrian-Anatolian region. This research laid the foundations for his key interest in the study of ancient Near Eastern visual arts with a focus on the anthropology, performance and perception of images. As a Principle Investigator in Topoi he puts a new emphasis on this interest by investigating the modes of representing and ordering space, including social space, in the pictorial systems of ancient Near Eastern civilizations. While thus remaining active as an ‘art historian’ in his field Dominik Bonatz also heads two excavation projects, one in North Syria since 2005, the other on Sumatra in Indonesia since 2002. The results of the excavation in Syria contribute to an understanding of the territorial expansion of the Middle Assyrian Empire in the late second millennium BC. Taking a generalizing archaeological perspective from this project Dominik Bonatz inquires in another research area of Topoi into the material components which became the means of creating and structuring political space.