Best selling author Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian, to speak at Fairfield University on "the Bloodlands" | Press Releases

"How Stalin and Hitler enabled each other's crimes and killed 14 million people between the Baltic and the Black Sea. A lifetime's work by a Yale University historian who deserves to be read and reread." - The Economist

Image: Timothy Snyder From 1933 through 1945, the land between Moscow and Germany became known as 'the Bloodlands,' where horrors of the Holocaust took place.

Best selling author Timothy Snyder, Ph.D., professor of history at Yale, will speak on this tragic era at Fairfield University, on Tuesday, October 4 at 7:30 p.m. Free and open to the public, the event is sponsored by Fairfield's Judaic Studies Program and the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies .

Dr. Snyder's talk, "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin," will center on his latest book, also of the same name, published by Basic Books in 2010. "In the lecture, I will be discussing all of the major German and Soviet policies as they effected the Bloodlands, where both regimes were at their most murderous," he said. "The subject of the lecture will be the greatest catastrophe in the history of the modern West, the murder of fourteen million civilians that culminated in the Holocaust."

In naming it one of the best books of 2010, The New Republic noted of Snyder's work: "The cumulative effect makes you reconsider every aspect of modern Europe and World War II." The New York Times bestseller made many other annual best books lists, including those of The Atlantic, The Economist, The Telegraph and The Forward, and was acclaimed by media around the world.

The New York Times Book Review observed: "Timothy Snyder ... compels us to look squarely at the full range of destruction committed first by Stalin's regime and then by Hitler's Reich. Each fashioned a terrifying orgy of deliberate mass killing .... Snyder punctuates his comprehensive and eloquent account with brief glimpses of individual victims, perpetrators and witnesses."

Dr. Snyder received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. He has held fellowships in Paris and Vienna, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He is the author of numerous books, including "Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz" (Harvard University Press, 1998; Halecki Prize), and "The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke" (Basic Books, 2008).

The talk will take place in the Dolan School of Business Dining Room. Seating is limited. For reservations, call (203) 254-4000, ext. 2066. For more information on other events, visit http://www.fairfield.edu/judaic/