John Connelly is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and Director of the Institute for East European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies. He earned his BSFS from Georgetown University, an MA (in Russian and East European Studies) from the University of Michigan, and a Phd from Harvard University.

His scholarship focuses on the history of East and Central Europe, with special concern for problems of religious and ethnic identity in multinational space.

He has published Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education (Chapel Hill, 2000),From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews (Harvard UP, 2012), and From Peoples Into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton, 2020), and is at work on a history of democracy in Europe, 1076-present.