Professor Sarah B. Snyder will discuss the history of human rights policy from the Cold War through to the present, especially how it has evolved across political administrations and set against the backdrop of major international developments.

Professor Sarah B. Snyder is an historian of U.S. foreign relations based at American University. She specializes in the history of the Cold War, human rights activism, and U.S. human rights policy. She is the author of From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018), which explains how transnational connections and 1960s-era social movements inspired Americans to advocate for a new approach to human rights. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations awarded it the 2019 Robert H. Ferrell Prize for distinguished scholarship in the history of American foreign relations. Her first book, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network, (Cambridge University Press), analyzes the development of a transnational network devoted to human rights advocacy and its contributions to the end of the Cold War. 

This seminar series is organised within the program on American politics and international security by Institut d’Estudis Nord-americans (IEN) and IBEI.

🔎 Check the first semester's agenda here.