Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Timothy Snyder

Kane Hall 120, UW Campus

May 23, 2012, 7 pm

Timothy Snyder is the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in the political history of central and eastern Europe. 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 is the author of numerous scholarly articles and five award-winning books 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). Prof. Snyder 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.

Prof. Snyder will speak about his book Bloodlands, which won five awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities and the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. The subject of the book and the lecture is the deliberate mass murder of 14 million civilians in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, comprising today’s Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic states, in the years when Hitler and Stalin were both in power. He will discuss Soviet and Nazi killing policies, from famine in Ukraine through the Holocaust of the Jews, with special emphasis on understanding why the lands between Hitler and Stalin were the most dangerous place on earth.

This event is organized by the UW Polish Studies Endowment Committee, and co-sponsored by several UW programs and departments: the Ellison Center, Baltic Studies, Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowment, Jackson School of International Studies, the Stroum Jewish Studies Programand the Simpson Center for the Humanities, as well as community organizations and individuals: Paul Raidna, Honorary Estonian Consul, Jay and Jeanne Kapsi (Estonian Community), Center for Czech Education and Culture, Lithuanian American Community, Latvian Association of the State of Washington, and the Ukrainian Association of Washington State.

Elliott Bay Book Company will be selling Prof. Snyder’s books at the event. They offer a 20% discount for teachers and librarians!