Timothy Snyder

Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto

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 also 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 (2010), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), The Road to Unfreedom (2018), and Our Malady (2020). Several of these have been described as best-sellers. He has participated in the Yalta European Strategy meetings in Kyiv since September 2014 (during his September 2022 visit to the conference, he held a two-hour private meeting with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy). 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 (chaired by Carl Bildt) 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.