Timothy D Snyder

Early life and education

Snyder was born in southwestern Ohio, the son of Christine (Hadley) and Estel Eugene Snyder. Snyder graduated from Centerville High School, 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of Dayton, where his father, a veterinarian and his mother reside. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Political Science from Brown University and his Doctor of Philosophy in Modern History in 1997 supervised by Timothy Garton Ash and Jerzy Jedlicki at the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford from 1991 to 1994.

Academic career

Snyder has held fellowships at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique 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 also been a Instructor at the College of Europe Warsaw Campus, the Baron Velge Chair at the Université libre de Bruxelles, the Cleveringa Chair at the University of Leiden, Philippe Romain Chair at the London School of Economics, and the 2013 René Girard Lecturer at Stanford University. Prior to assuming the Richard C. Levin Professorship of History, Snyder was the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University.

Snyder can speak and write English, French, German, Polish and Ukrainian and read Czech, Slovak, Russian, and Belarusian. He is also a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Personal life

Since 2005, Snyder has been married to Marci Shore, a professor of European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University. Snyder and Shore have two children together.

Work

Snyder has written five books and co-edited two. One of them, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), with the late historian Tony Judt, was written while the latter was dying of ALS disease.

Snyder has published essays in publications such as the International Herald Tribune, The Nation, New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, Eurozine, Tygodnik Powszechny, the Chicago Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Snyder says that he has a reading and/or speaking knowledge of eleven European languages. This enabled him to use primary and archival sources in Germany and Central Europe in researching his book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which was published in 2010. Reviewer Igor Lukes noted:

"A word about sources. Snyder introduces his Bibliography with an impressive list of seventeen archival collections located in six countries. Yet a closer look at the text and endnotes reveals that evidence drawn from archives represents but a small fraction of this book's evidentiary apparatus. This is a project built on secondary sources. The point is that many of Snyder's secondary sources are of the kind that even many specialists are unlikely to have seen, which is hardly surprising because Snyder can do research in ten languages, some pretty exotic. Bloodlands takes nuggets from each source, then assembles them into an original mosaic. Almost every paragraph of the book's eleven chapters is supported by one or several previously underutilized secondary sources."

Snyder says that knowing other languages is very important:

"If you don't know Russian, you don't really know what you're missing. ... We can only see as much, and we can only go as far as our languages take us. I wrote this book in English, but there are very important conversations that are happening in German, Russian, Polish and so on among those historians, and the book is addressed to all of them."

Bloodlands has been translated into 20 languages.

Snyder is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies.

For the academic year 2013–2014, he held the Philippe Roman Chair of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Asked about how the agenda of the Trump administration compared with the Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Snyder said that:

[H]istory does not repeat. But it does offer us examples and patterns, and thereby enlarges our imaginations and creates more possibilities for anticipation and resistance.

He echoed these sentiments in a May 2017 interview with Salon, warning that the Trump Administration will attempt to subvert democracy by declaring a state of emergency and take full control of the government, similar to Hitler's Reichstag fire: "it’s pretty much inevitable that they will try." According to Snyder, "Trump's campaign for president of the United States was basically a Russian operation."

Teaching

Snyder teaches a two-part lecture course at Yale covering the history of Eastern Europe pre- and post-1914, a critical turning point in world affairs. In the past he has also taught an undergraduate seminar on communism in Eastern Europe.

Awards

Selected works