Jan Hennings

Jan Hennings' work has focused on diplomatic practices and Russian-European encounters in the early modern period. He is currently working on a monograph-length study of Russian-Ottoman relations in the early eighteenth century, exploring the life and office of the first Russian resident ambassador in Istanbul, Peter A. Tolstoi.

Jan Hennings graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in History. Before joining the faculty of CEU, he  held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John's College Oxford and taught history as a Visiting Professor and Gerda Henkel Fellow at Sabanci University in Istanbul. He offers courses centered around comparative approaches to the history of diplomacy and early modern empires as well as on broader topics on European history, Russia, and the Ottoman world. He is an associate editor of the Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas and serves on the editorial board of Diplomatica: A Journal of Diplomacy and Society. Between 2016 and 2021 he was a member of the Junge Akademie at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He spent the year 2020/21 as a research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) and served as the Head of CEU's History Department in 2021-24. Currently he is a Key Researcher in the Austrian Cluster of Excellence "EurAsian Transformations".

Key Publications

Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648-1725. New Studies in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Reissued in paperback, 2018).

Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c. 1410-1800. Routledge Research in Early Modern History (London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Reissued in paperback, 2019). Co-edited with T. Sowerby.

"Andrew Marvell in Russia: Secretaries, Rhetoric, and Public Diplomacy," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 50 (2020), 565-586. Co-authored with E. Holberton.

"Information and Confusion: Russian Resident Diplomacy and Peter A. Tolstoi’s Arrival in the Ottoman Empire (1702–1703)," International History Review, 41 (2019), 1003-1019.

 "Textual Ambassadors and Ambassadorial Texts: Literary Representation and Diplomatic Practice in George Turberville’s and Thomas Randolph’s accounts of Russia (1568-9)," in Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World, ed. T. Sowerby, J. Craigwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 175-189.