Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of four rival modern nationalist ideologies from common medieval notions of citizenship. He presents the ideological innovations and ethnic cleansings that abetted the spread of modern nationalism but also examines recent statesmanship that has allowed national interests to be channeled toward peace.

""A work of profound scholarship and considerable importance."--Timothy Garton Ash, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford

""Timothy Snyder's style is a welcome reminder that history writing can be--indeed, ought to be--a literary pursuit."--Charles King, "Times Literary Supplement"

""A brilliant and fascinating analysis of the subtleties, complexities, and paradoxes of the evolution of nations in Eastern Europe. It has major implications for all of us who want to understand the processes of state collapse and nation-building in the world."--Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies

""Snyder's ultimate query in this fresh and stimulating look at the path to nationhood is how the bitter experiences along the way, including the bitterest--ethnic cleansing--are to be overcome."--Robert Legvold, "Foreign Affairs"

Timothy Snyder 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 and Vienna, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He is the author of five award-winning books, including: Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Harvard Press, 1998); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale Press, 2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Yale Press, 2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke (Basic Books, 2008). He is also the co-editor of two books Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and Stalin and Europe: War, Terror, Domination (forthcoming). In 2010 he published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow. It has received a number of honors, including the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities. It was named a book of the year by some dozen publications, has been translated into more than twenty languages, and was a bestseller in four countries. Click here for a list of reviews and links. Most recently he helped Tony Judt to compose a thematic history of political ideas and intellectuals in politics, Thinking the Twentieth Century, published by Penguin in February 2012.

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern East European political history. In 2012-2013 he will teach History 263-264, “Eastern Europe to 1914” and “Eastern Europe Since 1914,” as well as graduate seminars on the Holocaust and on east European history as global history.