Timothy Snyder

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.

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.

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.

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.

Snyder was born on August 18, 1969, in the Dayton, Ohio, area, the son of Christine Hadley Snyder, a teacher, accountant, and homemaker, and Estel Eugene Snyder, a veterinarian.

He was a Marshall Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1991 to 1994.

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 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.

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 the analysis of the life of Polish thinker Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz.

In 2003, he published The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999.

It focuses on the last few hundred years of history of several Central and Eastern European countries.

In 2005, he published Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine.

That book is a study on the interwar history of the Second Polish Republic and Soviet Ukraine 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.

In 2010, Snyder published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

Bloodlands was a best seller and has been translated into 30 languages.

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, as well as an introduction and response by Snyder.

Snyder's 2012 book Thinking the Twentieth Century was co-authored with Tony Judt while Judt was in the late stages of ALS disease.

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.

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.

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

Snyder has written fifteen books and co-edited two.

Snyder reads five European languages and speaks ten, enabling easier use of primary and archival sources in Germany and Central Europe during his research.

Snyder has stressed that in order to engage in such transnational history, knowing other languages is very important, saying "If you don't know Russian, you don't really know what you're missing."

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 in 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 those 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", and in a highly critical review Richard Evans wrote that, because of its lack of causal argument, "Snyder's book is of no use", and that Snyder "hasn't really mastered the voluminous literature on Hitler's Germany", which "leads him into error in a number of places" regarding the politics of Nazi Germany.

On the other hand, 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".

On September 25, 2020, he was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent group monitoring Facebook.

He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern European History and East European Politics and Societies.