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Timothy Snyder Author Visit

On Freedom Book Release Event

Timothy Snyder, acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 NYTimes bestseller On Tyranny, visits the Bexley Public Library to discuss his latest book, On Freedom. In partnership w/ The Book Loft.

Timothy Snyder, acclaimed Yale historian and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny, visits the Bexley Public Library to discuss his latest book, On Freedom. On Freedom has been called, "A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival." Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, will moderate the conversation.

Thank you to The Book Loft for partnering with us on this program and for providing book sales at this event.

From the publisher's page:

Timothy Snyder has been called “the leading interpreter of our dark times.” As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism here and abroad. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for.

Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.

On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder 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. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions (championed by the right) but also the role of institutions (the purview of the left). Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity, and grace."

About the Author:

Dr. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He speaks five and reads ten European languages. His eight chief books are 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); Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt, 2012); Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018). He has also co-edited three further books: The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (2001); Stalin and Europe: Terror, War, Domination (2013); and The Balkans as Europe (2018). His essays are collected in Ukrainian History, Russian Politics, European Futures (2014), and The Politics of Life and Death (2015). Snyder’s work has appeared in forty languages and has received a number of prizes, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Václav Havel Foundation prize, the Foundation for Polish Science prize in the social sciences, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee award, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. Snyder was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, has received the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships, and holds state orders from Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. He has appeared in documentaries, on network television, and in major films. His books have inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, films, sculpture, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera. His words are quoted in political demonstrations around the world, most recently in Hong Kong. His latest book, On Freedom, will be released on September 17 through Penguin Random House.

About the Moderator:

Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism from the College Art Association. She is also curator of the touring exhibition Marking Time, which debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2020. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). 

She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name.Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Brown University galleries, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Schomburg Center/NYPL, and  the Zimmerli Art Museum.  Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH. She is represented by Janklow & Nesbit and is finishing a nonfiction book titled Between the River and Railroad Tracks that will be published by Little, Brown.

Registration required. Join us in person, or live stream this program on BPL's YouTube channel.

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