Timothy Snyder
Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He 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 at the University of Toronto. From 2017 to 2025 he was the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University.
He is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Snyder serves on the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Snyder has written many 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 these have been described as best-sellers.
Early life and education
Timothy Snyder was born in 1969 near Dayton, Ohio; he is the son of Christine Hadley Snyder, a teacher, accountant, and homemaker, and Estel Eugene Snyder, a veterinarian. 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. They had served in Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador before starting their family in a prosperous suburb of Dayton. While in ninth grade, Snyder holidayed with them in a Quaker dairy commune in Costa Rica. He acknowledges having received a Quaker education.Snyder attended Centerville High School. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and political science from Brown University in 1991, and was influenced to take up European history by Mary Gluck and Thomas W. Simons Jr., who was soon to become US ambassador to Poland. He earned a D.Phil. degree in modern history in 1995 at the University of Oxford with a thesis on the Polish Marxist Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, supervised by Timothy Garton Ash and Polish Academy of Sciences' Jerzy Jedlicki. He was a Marshall Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1991 to 1994.
Career
Snyder 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; and the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University in 1997. He was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1998 to 2001. He joined the faculty of Yale University in 2001.Snyder 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. During the 2013–14 academic year, he held the Philippe Roman Chair of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before assuming the Richard C. Levin Professorship of History at Yale in 2017, Snyder was the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University.
Following the Maidan Revolution and Russian annexation of Crimea, he co-organised the Ukraine: Thinking Together conference in Kyiv in May 2014 with Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic. He has participated in the Yalta European Strategy meetings in Kyiv since September 2014. In November 2014, he attended the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk's decoration with the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Medal by the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine in Kyiv. In January 2019, he addressed the initial Ukraine House Davos event at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. On September 25, 2020, he was named as one of 25 members of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent group monitoring Facebook. In addition, he serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies.
In November 2023, he launched a deep history project named Ukrainian History Global Initiative, conceived and funded by Victor Pinchuk. He joined the Initiative's board of trustees and chairs its academic council featuring Timothy Garton Ash and Yuval Harari. He was selected as the keynote speaker for the Friends Committee on National Legislation annual meeting in 2025.
In July 2025, he assumed the Chair in Modern European History at Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, funded by the Temerty Family Foundation.
Works
Snyder has written fifteen books and co-edited two. He speaks five European languages and reads ten, facilitating the use of primary and archival sources in Germany and Central Europe during research. Snyder has stressed that knowing other languages is essential for his field, saying "If you don't know Russian, you don't really know what you're missing."Early works
Snyder's first book was the 1998 Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz. It is a study in nationalism through analysis of the life of the Polish thinker Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz.In 2003, he published The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. The book focuses on the history of several Central and Eastern European countries during the last few centuries.
In 2005, Snyder published the book Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. It is a study of the Second Polish Republic and Soviet Ukraine between World War I and World War II, as seen through the prism of the life of Henryk Józewski.
In 2008, he published The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. The book is an analysis of the life of Wilhelm von Habsburg.
''Bloodlands''
In 2010, Snyder published the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It was a best seller and has been translated into thirty languages. In an interview with Slovene historian Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič in 2016, Snyder described the book as an attempt to overcome the limitations of national history in explaining the political crimes perpetrated in Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s:The point of Bloodlands was that we hadn't noticed a major event in European history: the fact 13 million civilians were murdered for political reasons in a rather confined space over a short period of time. The question of the book was: 'How this could have happened?' We have some history of Soviet terror, of the Holocaust, of the Ukrainian famine, of the German reprisals against the civilians. But all of these crimes happened in the same places in a short time span, so why not treat them as a single event and see if they can be unified under a meaningful narrative.
Bloodlands received reviews ranging from highly critical to "rapturous". In assessing these reviews, Jacques Sémelin described it as one of the books that "change the way we look at a period in history". Sémelin noted that some historians have criticized the chronological construction of events, the arbitrary geographical delimitation, Snyder's numbers on victims and violence, and a lack of focus on interactions between different actors.
Omer Bartov wrote that "the book presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments". In a highly critical review, Richard Evans wrote that, because of its lack of causal argument, "Snyder's book is of no use"; Evans also wrote that Snyder "hasn't really mastered the voluminous literature on Hitler's Germany", which "leads him into error in a number of places" about the politics of Nazi Germany, including "equating Nazi genocide with the mass murders carried out in the Soviet Union under Stalin", which Evans considers "highly troubling".
By contrast, Wendy Lower wrote that it was a "masterful synthesis"; John Connelly called it "morally informed scholarship of the highest calibre"; and Christopher Browning described it as "stunning". The journal Contemporary European History published a special forum on the book in 2012, featuring reviews by Mark Mazower, Dan Diner, Thomas Kühne, and Jörg Baberowski, with an introduction and response by Snyder.
Later works
Snyder's 2012 book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, was co-authored with Tony Judt, while Judt was in the late stages of ALS disease. The book is based primarily on material by Judt, as edited by Snyder. It presents Judt's view on the history of the twentieth century.Snyder published Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning in 2015. The book, offering a "radically new explanation" of the Holocaust, and it received mixed reviews.
In 2017, he published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a short book about how to prevent a democracy from becoming a tyranny; the book focused on modern United States politics and on what he called "America's turn towards authoritarianism". The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction in 2017, and it remained on bestseller lists as late as 2021. On Tyranny has been featured in a rap song and in poster exhibitions.
In 2018, he published The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. The book explores Russian attempts to influence Western democracies; the book also explores the influence of philosopher Ivan Ilyin on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation in general.
In 2020, he published a book on the American health care system, called Our Malady.
In 2024, he published On Freedom, a book on how the concept of freedom has been misunderstood and must be redefined.
Snyder has contributed essays to publications including International Herald Tribune, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, Eurozine, Tygodnik Powszechny, Chicago Tribune, and The Christian Science Monitor.