Donald Jensen

Dr. Donald N. Jensen is Director of Russia and Europe at the United States Institute of Peace and an Adjunct Professor at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. A former US diplomat, Jensen provided technical support for the START, INF, and SDI negotiations and was a member of the first ten-man US inspection team to inspect Soviet missiles under the INF Treaty in 1988. From 1996-2008 he was Associate Director of Broadcasting and head of the Research Division at RFE/RL where he helped lead that organization’s expansion into new broadcast regions after the end of the Cold War and the adaptation of multimedia technology to deal with the broadcasting challenges of the 21st Century. In 2016 he was a foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaign of Governor John Kasich. Also in 2016 he was a Visiting Scholar at the NATO Defense College in Rome.

Jensen writes extensively on the domestic, foreign, and security policies of Russia, Ukraine, and the other post-Soviet states. He also regularly appears as a commentary on domestic and international media. He has lectured at a variety of universities, including Harvard, Oxford and George Washington University.

A noted baseball historian specializing in the Dead Ball Era and the 19th Century game, Jensen is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and has written or co-authored many books and articles on the sport. He was the 2015 winner of the Chairman’s Award of the SABR Nineteenth Century Committee. Jensen is the editor of the annual, award-winning book series, Baseball: New Research on the Early Game (McFarland). He also is a member of the selection committee for SABR’s Larry Ritter Book Award, which recognizes the best new baseball book primarily set in the Deadball Era that was published during the previous calendar year. At present he is producing a multimedia project for SABR on the history of concessions in Major League Baseball.

He received his PhD and MA from Harvard and BA from Columbia. He is fluent in Russian and Italian.