In this age of strife and turmoil, how do we think deeply and differently about the changes in our politics and our societies? The Yale professor of history and award-winning author delivers the annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture. For event details and more, visit https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2025/04/01/timothy-snyder
READ TIMOTHY SNYDER
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Do we live in an age of enlightenment or an age of divination? Timothy Snyder argues that our present moment—one in which obsession with the new distracts from patterns that are very old—is best understood as a political religion, rooted not in Christianity but in something far older and pagan. The pervasive nature of social media and rampant wealth inequalities seem to have created conditions for behavior that might typically be associated with myth, but instead perhaps reflect historically familiar patterns of behavior that now seem to be reasserting themselves.
The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky in recognition of the work of Robert B. Silvers, who was a co-founding editor of The New York Review of Books.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Timothy Snyder holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the head of the academic advisory council of Ukrainian History Global Initiative. He is currently on leave from his position as the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and will begin teaching at the Munk School in the 2025–2026 academic year.
A scholar of the history of Central Europe, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, Snyder speaks five and reads ten European languages. He is the author or editor of twenty books published in forty languages. Snyder writes for the press on Ukraine, the U.S, authoritarianism, digital politics, health, and education. He has also appeared in documentaries, on television, and as an expert witness before several parliaments. He has received state orders and decorations as well as honorary doctorates.
His work has inspired demonstrations, sculpture, posters, punk rock, rap, film, theater, and an opera.
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