Dominic Lieven


Dominic Lieven is a research professor at Cambridge University and a Fellow of the British Academy and of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Education

Lieven was educated at Downside School, a Benedictine Roman Catholic boarding independent school in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, near Shepton Mallet in Somerset, followed by Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated top of the class of 1973, and was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University in 1973/4.

Professor of Russian and International history

Lieven is a writer on Russian history, on empires and emperors, on the Napoleonic era and the First World War, and on European aristocracy. Lieven is on the Editorial Board of Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies. He was elected in 2001 Fellow of the British Academy, and was Head of the History Department at the London School of Economics from 2009 to 2011; he was appointed Lecturer there in 1978, and Professor in 1993. He was appointed to his current position at the University of Cambridge in 2011.

Political views

In May 2016, Lieven was one of 300 prominent historians who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian warning voters that if they chose to leave the European Union in a process called Brexit on 23 June of that year, they would be condemning Britain to irrelevance.

Controversy

Lieven was historical adviser on the BBC's television adaptation of War and Peace, which added incest to the narrative, and was slated by Downton Abbey advisor Alastair Bruce over its mistaken military costumes. Lieven said:

Personal life and ancestry

Dominic Lieven is the second son and third child of Alexander Lieven by his first wife, Irishwoman Veronica Monahan. He is the elder brother of Anatol Lieven and Nathalie Lieven QC, and a brother of Elena Lieven and distantly related to the Christopher Lieven, who was Ambassador to the Court of St James from Imperial Russia over the period 1812 to 1834, and whose wife was Dorothea von Benckendorff, later Princess Lieven, a notable society hostess in Saint Petersburg and influential figure among many of the diplomatic, political, and social circles of 19th-century Europe.
Lieven is "a great-grandson of the Lord Chamberlain of the Imperial Court" of Russia.
Lieven a friend of Simon Sebag Montefiore, and has read at least one of the latter's manuscripts.

Awards and honours