Timothy Snyder: On Freedom and Just Habits of Mind

Hosted by the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College on March 30, 2025, Timothy Snyder explored our present notions of freedom with an audience of 600.

”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.”

Dr. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. A scholar of history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, Snyder’s work has inspired political demonstrations, sculpture, posters, punk rock, rap, film, theater, and opera. Among his many accolades are the Leipzig Award, the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships.

On April 24, the Spence Wilson Center will host former NEH Chair Shelly Lowe, in a talk titled “Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future: The State of the Humanities Today.”

Established in 2024, the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College brings communities together to address complex, global questions through humanistic inquiry.