Jan joined the University of Limerick as the new History Chair in September 2021. He was diagnosed with terminal, inoperable cancer in May 2022 and had to retire on grounds of ill health in May 2023. He came to UL from Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Professor of History for nine years and initiated MA programmes in Black British History and Queer History. Jan completed a B.A. in History at Brandeis University (1992) and received his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley (2001). He then taught at Tübingen University and from 2008 to 2012 worked in Berlin as a Dilthey Fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Jan specialises in the History of Emotions and the Senses, the History of Migration and Russian History. Chronologically, he is most interested in the twentieth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to English he is fluent in German and Russian and has appeared in all three across various media (newspapers, radio, TV). Jan has held fellowships at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Historisches Kolleg in Munich, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena and Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald. He has served on a number of editorial and professional boards and founded and edited the Cambridge University Press series Elements on Histories of Emotions and the Senses. His own publications have been translated into other languages and won prizes. They include volumes, chapters and peer-reviewed articles in such journals as The American Historical Review as well as the monographs We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany (Cambridge, 2023), The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015), The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale, 2012).
