Jonathan Shepard

{{short description|British historian}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}

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| name = Jonathan Shepard

| honorific_suffix = {{post-nominals|country=GBR|size=100%|FRHistS}}

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| birth_date = {{birth year and age|1948}}

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| workplaces = University of Cambridge

| education = New College, Oxford

| thesis_title = Byzantium and Russia in the Eleventh Century: A Study in Political and Ecclesiastical Relations

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| thesis_year = 1974{{citation |title=[Catalogue entry] |publisher=Bodleian Libraries |website=SOLO |url=https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma990134187890107026}}

| doctoral_advisor = Dimitri Obolensky

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| notable_students = Peter Frankopan

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| major_works = The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (with Simon Franklin)

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Jonathan Shepard {{post-nominals|country=GBR|size=100%|FRHistS}} (born 1948) is a British historian specialising in early medieval Russia, the Caucasus, and the Byzantine Empire. He is regarded as a leading authority in Byzantine studies and on the Kievan Rus.Dimnik, "Reviewed work(s): The Emergence of Rus 750-1200", pp. 173—4; Martin, "Reviewed work(s): The Emergence of Rus 750-1200", pp. 154—5 . He specialises in diplomatic and archaeological history of the early Kievan period.Dimnik, "Reviewed work(s): The Emergence of Rus 750-1200", p. 174. Shepard received his doctorate in 1973 from Oxford University and was a lecturer in Russian History at the University of Cambridge. Among other works, he is co-author (with Simon Franklin) of The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (1996), and editor of The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (2008).

Among Shepard's theories is that the breakdown in Byzantine-Khazar relations and the shift in Byzantine foreign policy towards allying with the Pechenegs and the Rus against Khazaria was a result of the Khazar conversion to Judaism.