Sara Silverstein is an historian of public and global health, internationalism, and Modern and Eastern Europe. She is an expert on human rights, social rights and welfare, state forms and statelessness, migration and displacement, and humanitarianism. The author of For Your Health and Ours: An Eastern European History of Global Health (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), she is currently working on projects involving the history of health as a right, health and immigration, and statelessness.
An Associate Professor of History and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, where she co-directs the Research Program on Humanitarianism, Professor Silverstein is a Fellow of the Ukrainian History Global Initiative. She has been a Fox Fellow at Science Po, Paris, a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Yale University’s Jackson School for Global Affairs.
She is currently working on book projects addressing the history of commercial medicine and health as a right: Corporal Capitalism: A History of Health and Profit; a history of healthcare for displaced persons that situates trauma, disability, and illness as an indelible part of national reconstruction and internationalism after the Second World War: Hard Core: Displacement and Disease in the Recovery of Postwar Europe; and a study of rights and political forms of the modern state from the perspective of stateless activists: A Place to Exist: Histories of Statelessness from Empire to European Integration.
Professor Silverstein has spoken widely in North America and Europe and published on public and global health, experiments in democratic state-building and the breakdown of democracies, internationalism, human rights and social rights, state forms and statelessness, the First and Second World Wars and their aftermaths, and refugees and displacement.
She received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University, an M.Phil. in Modern European History from the University of Oxford, where she was a member of Balliol College, and an A.B. in Literature from Dartmouth College.
Professor Silverstein has worked with Timothy Snyder for over fifteen years, including serving as his chief of staff and senior research assistant from 2015 through 2018, and subsequently as a research collaborator. She was responsible for establishing Professor Snyder’s social media presence and advised on public engagement. She coordinated events and media appearances in more than thirty countries, and worked with offices of heads of government, international organizations, and major cultural figures. Professor Silverstein was involved in the research, publication, and publicity of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. She provided editorial assistance for pieces appearing in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Post, Slate, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.
She and Professor Snyder are co-authoring a project on state forms, statelessness, and rights in Ukraine.
BlueSky: @sarasilverstein.bsky.social
Twitter: @_S_Silverstein