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 (Oxford University Press, 2026), she is currently working on book projects involving the history of health as a right, health and immigration, and statelessness. As a Fellow of the Ukrainian History Global Initiative, she is co-authoring a history of political life in Ukraine with Timothy Snyder and a history of infectious disease and public health in Ukraine with John McNeill.
An Associate Professor of History and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, where she co-directs the Research Program on Humanitarianism, Professor Silverstein teaches courses on the history of human rights, public and global health, epidemics in literature, the politics of modern Eastern Europe, and how the world became global.
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. In addition to her academic publications, her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Thinking About…, Transit, Modernism/Modernity, and the CEU Review of Books.
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. 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 a Founding Fellow of the Public History Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Previously, Professor Silverstein served as chief of staff and senior research assistant to Timothy Snyder. Her experience includes establishing a high-profile social media presence and coordinating events and media appearances in more than thirty countries, working with offices of heads of government, international organizations, publishing houses, and major cultural figures. She has 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.
