As the world navigates a second Trump administration which has upended many of the precepts that have guided international order for decades, join Professor Ngaire Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, for a timely conversation with Professor Timothy Snyder, Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.  

Professor Snyder is an American historian specialising in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He has written many books including his most recent publication On Freedom, in which he identifies the practices and attitudes – the habits of mind – that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish, and in 2017, On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how to preserve freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

Professor Snyder’s latest essay, ‘Trump’s Civil War’ can be found here.

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

-Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny 

Professor Snyder will receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford during this year’s Encaenia ceremony.

Please note, registration for this event is now closed.