NORMAN – Timothy Snyder, one of the leading American historians and public intellectuals, will discuss “What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye: Some Questions and Answers about American Freedom” at a President’s Associates dinner at the University of Oklahoma on Thursday, April 12, in the Molly Shi Boren Ballroom of Oklahoma Memorial Union, 900 Asp Ave.
Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001, he held fellowships in Paris, Vienna and Warsaw, and was an Academy Scholar at Harvard.
“Professor Snyder in his books traces the ways in which tyranny has taken root in various societies and provides valuable lessons on how to preserve freedom in our own time,” said OU President David L. Boren.
Among Snyder’s publications are six single-authored award-winning books, all of which have been translated: “Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz”; “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1659-1999”; “Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine”; “The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke”; “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”; and “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.”
“Bloodlands” won 12 awards, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities; a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Leipzig Award for European Understanding; and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. It has been translated into 33 languages, was named to 12 book-of-the-year lists and was a bestseller in six countries. “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” will appear in some 30 foreign editions. It has been a bestseller in four countries and has received multiple distinctions including the award of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee. Snyder is also the co-editor of two books, “Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America” and “Stalin and Europe: Terror, War, Domination.”
Snyder’s recent book, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” appeared in the United States in February 2017 and is available in numerous foreign editions. “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America,” his newest book, was released this week.
Snyder sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies. His scholarly articles have appeared in Past and Present, Journal of Cold War Studies and 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.
Snyder was the recipient of an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2015 and received the Havel Foundation prize the same year. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2017. He has received state orders from Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, faculty adviser for the Fortunoff Collection of Holocaust Testimonies at Yale and sits on the advisory councils of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research and other organizations.
Snyder teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in modern eastern European political history and graduate seminars on the Holocaust, on Eastern European history as global history and on the dynamics of international crisis in European political history. Most recently, he taught lecture surveys, “Eastern Europe to 1914” and “Eastern Europe Since 1914”; graduate seminars on “The Global History of the Holocaust” and “Contemporary History of Diplomatic Crisis”; and an undergraduate seminar, “Communist Takeovers in Postwar Eastern Europe.”
Limited seating is available by reservation for OU students, faculty and staff, with overflow seating available to the public. For reservations, more information and accommodations, please call the OU Office of Public Affairs at (405) 325-3784 or email specialevents@ou.edu.
