- Tue November 17, 2026 at 8:00 pm
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum examines the pressures facing democratic societies and the resurgence of authoritarian rule through the lenses of world history and the contemporary political landscape. With decades of international reporting and expertise in Europe, she writes about the forces shaping global politics and the movements challenging democracy today.
Her work has explored subjects ranging from Syrian refugees to Vladimir Putin’s disinformation narratives, and from the European Union and its financial crises to the rise of political populists. As technology allows a new scale of media manipulation by authoritarian governments and changes the tenor of political discourse, she scrutinizes the misinformation, propaganda, and criminal exploitation that influence global affairs.
Applebaum is the author of several acclaimed books, including Gulag: A History, her landmark account of the Soviet concentration camp system, which received the Pulitzer Prize; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1946; and Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe. Her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism became a New York Times bestseller, as did her most recent book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, released in 2024.
In 2024, she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of Europe’s most distinguished cultural honors.
Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She previously wrote a foreign affairs column for The Washington Post and served on its editorial board, and was The Economist’s Warsaw correspondent during the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe. She is a Senior Fellow of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
She attended Yale University and was a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Antony’s College, Oxford.