What History Teaches: Eastern Europe & the Impact of Totalitarianism
About the Event
Eastern Europe was a crucial site of atrocity, complicity, and resistance during the Second World War; examining it today helps us understand the dangers of normalizing hate. Professor Marci Shore is an historian of totalitarianism, with a focus on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. In this lecture, Professor Shore situates Eastern Europe as a critical area for understanding the impact of absolute state power, exploring how individuals suffered from the parallel and overlapping experiences of Nazism and Stalinism. This analysis will identify the patterns and dynamics that enable tyranny and lead to societal breakdown.
About the Speakers
Marci Shore
Marci Shore began a position as Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School for Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto in 2025. She was previously professor of history at Yale University; she has also been a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna since 2004. In spring 2025, she guest curated, together with Oksana Forostyna, the Kyiv Book Arsenal with the theme “Everything is Translation.” 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. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in 2024. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Eurozine, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her book project about phenomenology in East-Central Europe tentatively titled In Pursuit of Certainty Lost: Central European Encounters on the Way to Truth.