Timothy Snyder appointed the inaugural Richard C. Levin Professor of History

April 10, 2017

Timothy D. Snyder, newly appointed as the inaugural Richard C. Levin Professor of History, is a renowned historian who specializes in the history of Central and Eastern Europe.

Among Snyder’s publications are six award-winning scholarly books, all of which have been translated. His most celebrated work, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” was translated into more than 30 languages and won 12 awards, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Leipzig Award for European Understanding. His subsequent book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” will also appear in approximately 30 foreign editions and received the awards of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee and Association of Jewish Veterans of Poland. Another body of work includes several books about the intersection of historical ideas and contemporary politics in Europe and the United States. Most recently, Snyder published “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” Currently, he is at work on a global history of Eastern Europe and a family history of nationalism. His scholarly articles have appeared in Past and Present and the Journal of Cold War Studies, among other journals. He has also written for The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, and The New Republic as well as for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers.

A graduate of Brown University, Snyder received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. He spent much of the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe, learning the languages that made his subsequent work possible. In 2001 he came to Yale, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern East European political history. During his time at Yale he has been decorated by Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia for his scholarly work. The American flag was flown in his honor over the House of Representatives as an acknowledgement of his contributions to public debate. In April 2017, he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, given to those “who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

Snyder regularly participates in conferences on Holocaust education and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and serves on the advisory councils of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research and other organizations.

The Richard C. Levin Professorship of History was established in honor of Richard C. Levin by senior fellows of the Yale Corporation who served during his tenure as president of the university.

via Yale News