Timothy Snyder
Timothy Snyder holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the head of the academic advisory council of Ukrainian History Global Initiative. He is currently on leave from his position as the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and will begin teaching at the Munk School in the 2025-2026 academic year.
A scholar of the history of Central Europe, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, Snyder speaks five and reads ten European languages. He is the author or editor of twenty books published in forty languages. Snyder writes for the press on Ukraine, the U.S, authoritarianism, digital politics, health, and education. He has also appeared in documentaries, on television, and as an expert witness before several parliaments. He has received state orders and decorations as well as honorary doctorates.
The prizes and awards Snyder has received include include the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Çï¿ûÊÓƵ 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.
His books include Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (2008); Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt, 2012); Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018). He has also co-edited three further books: The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (2001); Stalin and Europe: Terror, War, Domination (2013); and The Balkans as Europe (2018). His essays are collected in Ukrainian History, Russian Politics, European Futures (2014), and The Politics of Life and Death (2015).
Snyder received his Bachelor of Arts in European history and political science from Brown University in 1991. He then became a British Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he completed his doctorate in 1997.