Timothy Snyder
Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.[2][3]
For the American mathematician and academic administrator, see Timothy Law Snyder.
Timothy Snyder
2
American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Award (2003),[1]
Hannah Arendt Prize (2013),
The VIZE 97 Prize (2015)
History of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust
He has written several books, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom, and Our Malady. Several of them have been described as best-sellers.[4][5]
Snyder serves on the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Early life and education[edit]
Snyder was born on August 18, 1969,[6] in the Dayton, Ohio, area, the son of Christine Hadley Snyder, a teacher, accountant, and homemaker, and Estel Eugene Snyder, a veterinarian.[7] Snyder's parents were married in a Quaker ceremony in 1963 in Ohio, and his mother was active in preserving her family farmstead as a Quaker historic site. Snyder attended Centerville High School. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history and political science from Brown University and his doctor of philosophy degree in modern history in 1995 at the University of Oxford while under the supervision of Timothy Garton Ash and Jerzy Jedlicki. He was a Marshall Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1991 to 1994.[8]
Career[edit]
Snyder has held fellowships at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris from 1994 to 1995, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in 1996, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University in 1997, and was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1998 to 2001.
He has been an instructor at the College of Europe Natolin Campus, the Baron Velge Chair at the Université libre de Bruxelles, the Cleveringa Chair at the Leiden University, Philippe Romain Chair at the London School of Economics, and the 2013 René Girard Lecturer at Stanford University.[9][10][11] Prior to assuming the Richard C. Levin Professorship of History, Snyder was the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University.
He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[12] On September 25, 2020, he was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent group monitoring Facebook.[13]
He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies.[14]
For the academic year 2013–2014, he held the Philippe Roman Chair of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.[15]
Personal life[edit]
In 1994, Snyder married fellow academic Milada Vachudova, with whom he also collaborated on scholarly work.[87][88] Snyder's second marriage was in 2005 to Marci Shore, a professor of European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University. The couple have two children together and reside in New Haven, Connecticut.[89][90]
In December 2019, Snyder fell seriously ill following a series of medical misdiagnoses. While recuperating through the coronavirus pandemic he wrote Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary, about the problems of the for-profit health care system in the USA, and the coronavirus response so far.[52][91]
Charity[edit]
On November 2, 2022, Timothy Snyder became the tenth ambassador of UNITED24.[92] He has set up a fundraiser to collect donations for a system to counter Russian unmanned aerial vehicles in Ukraine, and thereby to protect Ukraine's critical infrastructure.[37][93] He also launched the "Documenting Ukraine" project to support journalists, scholars, artists, public intellectuals, and archivists based in Ukraine in their efforts to create a factual record of the war.[94]
Starting in November 2023, Snyder will lead 90 scholars in the "Ukrainian History Global Initiative" to study Ukraine and its history. The initiative is a charitable foundation that will include disciplines beyond history and sponsor three major academic conferences, various publications, and archaeological excavations.[95][96]