Cleveringa lecture by Timothy Snyder

On 26 November Professor Timothy Snyder will deliver the Cleveringa lecture. The title of his talk will be 'The Bloodlands, the Cleveringa Legacy and the Future of European History'. Venue: the Great Auditorium in the Academy Building, where Cleveringa himself delivered his protest lecture in 1940.

Bloodlands

In Bloodlands (2010) Snyder focuses on Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945, the area in which the megalomaniacal ambitions of Hitler and Stalin overlapped, and where together, their regimes systematically murdered 14 million people: with bullets, in mass extermination camps, or by starvation. Bloodlands has been translated into over 20 languages, including Dutch (Bloedlanden. Europa tussen Hitler en Stalin, Ambo/Anthos 2011).

Another period of mass murder

In his Cleveringa lecture Snyder will present his analysis of the Holocaust and will examine ways of applying this analysis to other episodes of mass extermination. He will ask such questions as: What is the role of the law, and what is the role of the individual: as a player, but also as a chronicler?

Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale Unversity. He focuses primarily on the hstory of Central and Eastern Europe, in particular Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States. He wrote Thinkingthe Twentieth Century, a history of the political ideas of the 20th century, together with intellectual and author Tony Judt, who died in 2010. 

The first Cleveringa lecture

It was on 26 November 1940 that Professor Rudolph Cleveringa delivered his famous lecture in Leiden's Great Auditorium. He was protesting against the dismissal of his Jewish colleague, Professor E.M. Meijers. The occupying German forces had decreed that 'non-Arian government staff and staff of equivalent status' should be dismissed. 

The Cleveringa Chair

The Cleveringa Chair was founded in 1970, 25 years after the Liberation, even though the Cleveringa lecture had already been commemorated every year since 1946 with meetings and lectures. It is a rotating professorship, to which every academic year a Dutch or foreign scholar is appointed. Recent holders of the chair include Job Cohen, Hans Blom and David van Reybrouch. In addition to giving the Cleveringa inaugural lecture, Snyder will also be teaching.

(2 October 2012)

Register for the Clevering lecture

All interested parties are welcome to register for the lecture:

http://www.leidenuniv.nl/agenda/item/cleveringa-oratie1

In view of the number of people attenting, please make sure you are seated in good time.

See also

• Personal webpage of Professor Timothy Snyder, Yale University

• Cleveringa Dossier

• Registration form 

Books by Professor Snyder

• The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke (Basic Books, 2008)
  De rode prins. Het einde van een dynastie en de opkomst van het moderne Europa (Ambo 2009)

• Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Yale Press, 2005)

• The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale Press, 2003)

• Co-editor Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001)

• Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Harvard Press, 1998)