Jan Hennings

On research leave 2025/26.

Jan Hennings' work has focused on diplomatic practices in the early modern period. He is currently working on a monograph-length study of Russian-Ottoman relations at the beginning of the 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. He was a fellow in residence at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in 2020-21 and served as Head of CEU's History Department in 2021-24. Currently he co-directs the MA program in Museum Studies, a collaboration between CEU and Wien Museum, and is a Key Researcher in the Austrian Cluster of Excellence "EurAsian Transformations".

Jan Hennings would welcome enquiries from prospective students interested in working on:

• Early modern Europe
• Muscovy and Imperial Russia
• History of diplomacy and international relations
• Russian-Ottoman relations

• Travel literature and cultural encounter

   

Key Publications 

Book

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

Edited Volume

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

Recent Publications

"Political Ceremonies and Rituals in the Early Modern World," Journal of Early Modern History, 29 (2025), 157-181.

"Zwischen Schreckensherrschaft und aufgeklärter Despotie: Ivan IV. 'der Schreckliche' und Peter I. 'der Große'", in Tyrannen: Eine Geschichte von Caligula bis Putin, ed. B. Stollberg-Rilinger, A. Krischer, (Munich: Beck Verlag, 2022; 2nd edn. 2023), 121-36.

"Constantinople as a 'Window on Europe': Peter the Great’s Ambassador and Diplomatic Hierarchies at the Sultan’s Court," Vek Prosveshcheniia / Le Siècle des Lumières, vol. 7, ed. S. Karp et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 2021), 54-73.

"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.

"Rang und Kultur: Vergleiche in der Geschichte russisch-europäischer Beziehungen," in Rang oder Ranking? Dynamiken und Grenzen des Vergleichs in der Vormoderne, ed. F.-J. Arlinghaus, P. Schuster (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2020), 17-36.

"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.

"Balance of Power und Theatrum Praecedentiae: Russland im Spiegel der Zeremonialliteratur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts," in Die Flucht des Thronfolgers Aleksej: Krise in der „Balance of Power“ und den österreichisch-russischen Beziehungen am Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. I. Schwarcz (Berlin, Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2019), 11-24.

‘"The Failed Gift: Ceremony and Gift-giving in Anglo-Russian Relations, 1660-1664," in Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c. 1410-1800, ed. T. Sowerby, J. Hennings (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 237-53.

"'A Perfect Relation of The Reception, Audience, and Dispatch, of All Ambassadors from Foreign Princes, sent unto The Emperour of All Russia': Pristav, Master of Ceremonies und die Dokumentation des frühneuzeitlichen Gesandtschaftsrituals in vergleichender Perspektive," Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Beiheft 52 (2016), 71-94.

Awards

ESSA Book Prize 2017 "for most outstanding recent scholarly monograph on pre-modern Slavdom," awarded for Russia and Courtly Europe by the Early Slavic Studies Association, an affiliate of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)

Hedwig Hintze Prize 2012. Best dissertation award of the German Historical Association

Fritz Theodor Epstein Prize 2012. Best dissertation award of the Association of Historians of Eastern European History (Germany)

Fellowships

Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS Uppsala), Fellow in Residence, 2020-21

Elected member of the Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Member, 2016-21

Gerda Henkel Foundation, Research Fellow and Visiting Professor, Sabanci University Istanbul, 2013-15

St John's College (University of Oxford), Junior Research Fellow, 2009-13

Teaching

PhD supervision

Table Set for Diplomats: Food, Drink, and Politics in Polish-Lithuanian Diplomatic Relations, 1674–1696

Negotiating Meaning: Authorial Agency and Organization of Knowledge in Francesco Sansovino and Scipione Ammirato

Venetian-Muscovite Diplomatic Encounters and the Production of Knowledge from the Mid-Seventeenth Century to the Peace Negotiations at Karlowitz

Developments in Diplomatic Culture in Early Modern Sino-Russian Relations, 1618-1727

The Classical Tradition and Shaping Myths of Origins in Early Modern East-Central Europe

Checkmate Diplomacy: Soft Power, Soviet Strategy, and the Diplomatic Transformation of the International Chess Federation

MA supervision (selected titles):

• Ceremonial Representation in Cross-Confessional Diplomacy: The Ottoman Embassy of a Christian Ambassador to Moscow in 1621
• Diplomatic Intermediaries During Rákóczi’s War of Independence, 1703–1711
• Official Physicians Within the Medical Landscape of the Russian Empire (1760s)
• The Temperance Movement: Alcohol and Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Russia,
• Muscovite Diplomacy and the 1682 Moscow Uprising
• Consular Affairs: Exploring the Practices of Austro-Hungarian Consular Diplomacy in the Ottoman Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean around 1900
• Sixteenth-Century Travel Literature Collectors and the Image of the Ottomans in Humanist Thought: Francesco Sansovino and Richard Hakluyt
• Art and Artists as Agents of Empire: 'Russianess' in the Exhibitions of Vasily Vereshchagin
• Muslims of the Russian Empire and Hajj Bureaucracy in the Official Reports and Hajjnames of Volga-Ural Muslims at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• Reciprocal Diplomacy between the Republic of Venice and the Muscovite Court: The Embassies of Alberto Vimina (1655) and Ivan Chemodanov (1656)
• Emancipation, Modernization, Riot: Tbilisi’s Amkrebi and Russian Imperial Rule (1801-67)
• The "Eastern Question" in the Russian Empire’s Western Province: The Case of Kyiv in the 1870s
• Russia, Austria, and Old Believers: The Entanglements of Religious and Foreign Policies in 1846-1856

Courses taught in previous years (selection): 

• The Perfect Ambassador? International Relations and the Origins of Diplomacy, 1500-1800
• Global Comparisons: Russia and the Ottoman Empire, 1453-1839 (with Brett Wilson)
• Interdisciplinary Methods of Comparative History
• Decentering EurAsian Empires and Geographies 1200s to the Present (with Tijana Krstic)
• Grand Debates in Russian and Eurasian History (with Charles Shaw)
• Barbarians, Infidels, and Noble Savages: Stereotypes and Inter-cultural Perception in the Early Modern Period and Beyond
• History of Collecting: Concepts and Practices (with Marcell Sebök)
• Comparative Approaches to Historical Research (PhD)
• History of Archives: the State of the Art from Medieval to (Post-) Colonial Studies (with Tijana Krstic)