Jennifer L. Jenkins is a global historian who writes on Iran from the perspectives of international diplomacy and political economy. An Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in German History at the University of Toronto, she is working on two book manuscripts: “The Persian Question: Germany and Iran in the Age of Empire, 1815-1914” and “The German Orient, 1905-1979.” She has held fellowships from the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She was an Associate at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin (2017-2018) and a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University (2013-2014). In December 2019 she was an Eva and Victor Klemperer Fellow at the TU Dresden. In 2022 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
“The Persian Question” investigates Iran and Germany in the international system before 1914, exploring Germany’s Middle Eastern networks between the Crimean War and the First World War and highlighting the entanglement of German, British, and Russian policies in the region. It specifically analyzes German diplomatic support for the Iranian and Turkish nationalist movements, and the changes this brought to international diplomacy and European alliance politics in the lead up to the war in 1914.
“The German Orient” analyzes what was called “Germany in Asia” as a twentieth-century political and economic project, which ran through government and civil society connections and took shape as a series of encounters between German institutions and nationalist and anti-colonial intellectuals across the Middle East and South Asia. “The German Orient” expands the project of global history by foregrounding economic history and European/Asian connections, analyzing specifically Germany’s twentieth-century projects of economic expansion and their transnational actors.
Selected recent publications:
“Germany’s Global East: World-Making in The New Orient,” in Santanu Das, Daniel Steinbach and Anna Maguire, eds., Colonial Encounters in a Time of Global Conflict, 1914-1918 (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 287-309.
Co-author with Heike Liebau and Larissa Schmid, “Transnationalism and Insurrection: Independence Committees, Anti-Colonial Networks, and Germany’s Global War,” Journal of Global History 15, 1 (March 2020): 61-79. (lead author)
“Jihad or Nationalist Revolution? German Strategies for Insurrection in the Middle East,” in Andreas Gestrich and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., Bid For World Power? New Research on the Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 357-376.
“Iran in the Nazi New Order, 1933-1941,” Iranian Studies, 49, 5 (November 2016): 727-751.
“Hjalmar Schacht, Reza Shah, and Germany’s Presence in Iran,” Iran Nameh 30, 1 (Spring 2015): 20-46.
“Experts, Migrants, Refugees: Making the German Colony in Iran, 1900-1934,” in Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age, 1884-1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 147-169.
“Germany’s Eurasian Strategy in 1918,” in Helmut Bley and Anorthe Kremers, eds., The World During the First World War (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2014), pp. 291-302.
“The Trouble with Third Powers: German-Iranian Relationships to 1941,” Iran Nameh 28, 1 (Spring 2013): 62-85 (translated and published in Persian).
“Fritz Fischer’s ‘Programme for Revolution’: Implications for a Global History of Germany in the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History, 48, 2 (April 2013): 397-417.
“Excavating Zarathustra: Ernst Herzfeld’s Archaeological History of Iran,” Iranian Studies, 45, 1 (January 2012): 1-27.