31.07.2025

Florian Kühnel was awarded the Otto-Hintze-Nachwuchspreis 2025

The IEG warmly congratulates Florian Kühnel on receiving the Otto-Hintze-Nachwuchspreis, which was awarded to him on July 11, 2025, in Berlin for his habilitation thesis »Diplomacy as Collective Practice: Embassy Secretaries and Everyday Diplomatic Life in Early Modern Istanbul.« Michael Borgolte, founder of the award and former professor of medieval history at Humboldt University in Berlin, praised Florian Kühnel in his laudatory speech for, among other things, his »art of presentation, which turns a supposedly dry subject into a captivating narrative that makes readers forget the time and circumstances of their reading.«

»Michael-und-Claudia-Borgolte-Stiftung zur Förderung der Geschichtswissenschaften an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin« awards the Otto-Hintze-Nachwuchspreis for outstanding young scholars in the field of historical studies.

Florian Kühnel has been a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for European History (IEG) in Mainz since March 2022. He successfully completed his habilitation in modern and contemporary history at Humboldt University in Berlin in January 2024. His habilitation has been published as volume 29 of the series Frühneuzeit-Forschungen by Wallstein Verlag - also in open access. The publisher writes about the title: "Diplomacy - that is negotiations between envoys, rulers and ministers about war and peace, according to the common view. In his book, however, Florian Kühnel shows that diplomacy in the early modern period was much more than that: it was not an individual achievement of individual “great men”, but a “collective practice” in which various - male as well es female - actors participated and which encompassed much more than negotiations alone." (Translated by IEG)

Picture details: Prof. em. Dr Michael Borgolte, left, and Florian Kühnel, right. Photographer: Nikola Burkhardt. Image rights: Michael-und-Claudia-Borgolte-Stiftung zur Förderung der Geschichtswissenschaften