Timothy Snyder, October 24
The Russian History Seminar will hold its next meeting of the 2014-2015 academic year on Friday, October 24, 4:00pm-5:15pm at the Mortara Center on the Georgetown University campus. Timothy Snyder will present his paper, “Double Occupations.” This is a chapter from his forthcoming book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.
Timothy Snyder is the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in the history of central and eastern Europe. Born in 1969 in southwestern Ohio and a graduate of Centerville High School, he received his B.A. from Brown University and his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was a British Marshall Scholar at Balliol College. He has also held fellowships in Paris, Warsaw, and at Harvard, where he was an Academy Scholar. A frequent guest at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, he has spent about ten years in Europe. He speaks five and reads ten European languages. Among his publications are five award-winning books, all of which have been translated: 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); and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). Bloodlands has won ten awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Leipzig Award for European Understanding. It has been translated into twenty-five languages, was named to twelve book-of-the-year lists, and was a bestseller in four countries. Most recently Snyder helped the late Tony Judt compose a thematic intellectual history, entitled Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), which is appearing in fourteen translations. Snyder is also the co-editor of two volumes: Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (2000) and Stalinism and Europe: Terror, War, Domination (2014). He is at work on four books: a study of the Holocaust, a biography of Marx, a global history of eastern Europe, and a family history of nationalism. His scholarly articles have appeared in Past and Present, the Journal of Cold War Studies, and a number of other journals; he has also written for The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, and The New Republic as well as for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers. He takes regular part in conferences on Holocaust education and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and sits on the advisory councils of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and other organizations.