Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder's picture
Richard C. Levin Professor of History
On Leave: 
Academic Year 24-25
Office: 
Horchow Hall, Room 203 (55 Hillhouse)
Fields of interest: 

Modern Eastern Europe

Bio: 
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. A scholar of history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, Snyder speaks five and reads ten European languages, has written 16 books, including six on Ukraine, and co-edited two. His work, published in forty languages, has inspired political demonstrations, sculpture, posters, punk rock, rap, film, theater, opera, and earned him six state orders and decorations from Austria, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as four honorary doctorates. Prizes and awards include the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Václav Havel Foundation Prize, the Foundation for Polish Science Prize, Le Prix du livre d’Histoire de l’Europe, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee Award, the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Pell Center Prize, the Transatlantic Bridge Award, the Silvers-Dudley Prize, the Madame de Staël Prize, Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships, and the Marshall Scholarship at Oxford.
 
Snyder writes and speaks in the international press on Ukraine, American politics, strategies for averting authoritarianism, digital politics, health, and education, also appearing in documentaries, on network television, in major films, and as an expert witness to Congress. He is an ambassador to United 24 where he launched the Safe Skies fund for military defense of Ukraine. Snyder leads 90 scholars in the Ukrainian History Global Initiative, a charitable foundation for research on prehistory of Ukrainian lands, the spread of Indo-European languages, international relations, nation building, and imperialism.
 
Books include: On Freedom (publication date: September, 2024), Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020), The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) with an audio edition adding twenty lessons from Russia’s war on Ukraine (2022) and a graphic edition illustrated by Nora Krug (2021), Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015), Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt, 2012), and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010).
 
Recent Courses Taught 
ER&M 231 / HIST 232 Hitler, Stalin, and Us (Spring)
HIST 691 Empire and Nation in Eastern Europe (Spring)
HIST 247 The Making of Modern Ukraine (Fall)
HIST 683: Global History of Eastern Europe (Fall)
HIST 264 / ER&M 263 / RSEE 268: Eastern Europe since 1914 (Spring)
GLBL 6110 / HIST 682 / PHIL 770 / HUMS 286 / ER&M 279 / HIST 295J / PHIL 433: Mass Incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States (Spring)

       

   

Period: 
Modern
Recent
Geography: 
Eastern Europe
Global/International
Russia
Western Europe
Thematic: 
Comparative
Empires & Colonialism
Environmental
Gender & Sexuality
Jewish
Political
Spatial/Geographic
War & Society