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 ten 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); The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018); and Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020).  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.  He is researching a family history of nationalism and finishing a philosophical book about freedom.

Elzbieta Matynia is Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and founding director of the 

The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). Her research in political and cultural sociology focuses on democratic transformations, gender and democracy, the borderlands of a shared Europe, and more recently on the challenges faced by democracies emerging with a legacy of violence.

Her book Performative Democracy (2009) examines a potential in political life that easily escapes theorists: the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens, and identifies the conditions for performativity in public life. Challenges following 1989 are explored in her books Grappling with Democracy (1995), The Social Science in Transition: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe, and An Uncanny Era. Conversations between Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel (2013). More recent publications include “The Promise of Active Freedom” (2018), “How to Kill a Democracy?” (2019), “Is Liberal Democracy Already History?” (2020)

As head of TCDS, she has developed and directs international Democracy & Diversity Institutes for rigorous study and cross-cultural research on the critical issues facing today’s world. A Fulbright research scholar in South Africa, she is working on a book, Democracy After Violence. Elzbieta is a member of the editorial board of Social Research.

Marci Shore teaches modern European intellectual history. She received her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1996 and her Ph.D from Stanford University in 2001; she taught at Indiana University before coming to Yale. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński’s The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current book project, a history of phenomenology in East-Central Europe, tentatively titled “Eyeglasses Floating in Space: Central European Encounters That Came about While Searching for Truth.” She is a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Presently she is co-curating a Democracy Seminar/Eurozine forum “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life” (title stolen from Nietzsche).

Her articles and essays include “Philosophy in the Time of Revolution” (The Interlocutor: Journal of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas); “Can We See Ideas? On Evocation, Experience, and Empathy” (Modern European Intellectual History); “Entscheidung am Majdan: Eine Phänomenologie der Ukrainischen Revolution” (Lettre International); “Jews and Cosmopolitanism: An Arc of European Thought” (Historická Sociologie), “(The End of) Communism as a Generational History” (Contemporary European History); “‘If we’re proud of Freud…: The Family Romance of Judeo-Communism” (East European Politics and Societies); “Rescuing the Yiddish Ukraine (New York Review of Books) “Die Zerbrechlichkeit des Liberalismus oder Das Ende vom ‘Ende der Geschichte’” (Transit: Europäische Revue); “Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, Żydokomuna, and Totalitarianism” (Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History); “Children of the Revolution: Communism, Zionism, and the Berman Brothers” (Jewish Social Studies); “Czysto Babski: A Women’s Friendship in a Man’s Revolution” (East European Politics and Societies); “Engineering in the Age of Innocence: A Genealogy of Discourse Inside the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, 1949-1967” (East European Politics and Societies); “In Search of Meaning after Marxism: The Komandosi, March 1968, and the Ideas that Followed” (Warsaw: The History of a Jewish Metropolis); “Dissidents, Intellectuals, and a New Generation” (The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History); (Modernism in) “Eastern Europe” (The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism); “On Cosmopolitanism and the Avant-Garde, and a Lost Innocence of Mitteleuropa” (Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility); and “Wspomnienie o Krzysztofie Michalskim (1948-2013)” (Zeszyty Literackie).

Irena Grudzińska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after student unrest of 1968. She studied in Poland, Italy and in the United States; she received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory, New York, Boston and Princeton universities. Her books include Golden Harvest with Jan T. Gross, Oxford University Press, 2012, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, Yale University Press, 2009, and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination, University of California Press, 1995. She edited books on literature and the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe and published numerous book chapters and articles on these subjects in the international press and periodicals. Between 1998-2003, she was responsible for the East-Central European Program at the Ford Foundation.

As a Guggenheim Fellow she is working on a biography of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski (1901-1964), an Austrian-Jewish physicist, political prisoner, writer, businessman, communist, then anti-communist and gambler. His life will be an entry point into the most important phenomena in twentieth-century East-Central European Jewish history: social mobility limited by violence and discrimination, assimilation through education and politics, internationalism versus national affiliation, family discontinuities, and geographic displacement. Weissberg’s life, the story of his milieu and that story’s aftereffects on her own post-World War II generation will constitute three aspects of that book.

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology Emeritus at The New School for Social Research.

He is the author of dozens of articles and eight books, including Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power, The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times and Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society. He is the founder of the online magazine Public Seminar and the convener of The Democracy Seminar, first developed in the 1980s as an exchange between oppositionist groups in Central Europe and the United States, and in 2018 reconvened as a “World Wide Committee of Democratic Correspondence.”

 
Goldfarb lived in Poland in 1973-4 doing the research for his dissertation on Polish Student Theater. He collaborated with the democratic opposition before Solidarnosc and worked with Solidarnosc both above and below ground in the 1980s. Since 1989, he has annually returned to Poland to teach in an institute on Democracy and Diversity. For his work in Poland, he received the Solidarity Medal, presented by former President Lech Walesa, on behalf of the Polish government, in recognition of support for Solidarity, commemorating its 25th anniversary, September 28, 2005, and the Medal of Gratitude, from the European Solidarity Centre, Gdansk, Poland, 2012.