Serhii Plokhy

Serhii Mykolayovych Plokhy (; born 23 May 1957) is a historian and author. He is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where between 2013 and 2025 he also served as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Early life and education Serhii Plokhy was born in Nizhny Novgorod (then called Gorkiy), RSFSR, to Ukrainian parents. He spent his childhood and school years in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, where his family returned soon after his birth.

Plokhy received his undergraduate degree in history and social sciences from the University of Dnipropetrovsk (1980), where he studied under professors Mykola Kovalskyi and Yuriy Mytsyk, and his graduate degree from the Russian University of the Friendship of Peoples (1982), specializing in historiography and source studies. He received his habilitation degree in history from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1990.

Academic career Between 1983 and 1991, Plokhy taught at the University of Dnipropetrovsk, where he was promoted to the rank of full professor and held a number of administrative positions during perestroika. In 1996, after a number of visiting appointments as the Ramsey Tompkins Professor of Russian history at the University of Alberta, Plokhy joined the staff of the university's Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, where he founded the Research Program on Religion and Culture. As part of the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research, he participated in the publication of the English-language translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's History of Ukraine-Rus.

In 2007, Plokhy was named the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. Since 2013, he has served as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where he leads a group of scholars working on MAPA: The Digital Atlas of Ukraine, an online, GIS-based project. Much of Plohky's evidence in the book comes from published sources, but "he tells the story with great assurance and style, and the majority of his material appears here for the first time in English," wrote Tobie Mathew in Literary Review.

In 2009, Plokhy received the Early Slavic Studies Association Distinguished Scholarship Award, and in 2013 he was named the Walter Channing Cabot Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University for scholarly eminence in the field of history. In 2015 Serhii Plokhy received the Antonovych prize, and in 2018 the Shevchenko National Prize (Ukraine). In 2024 he was awarded the Arenberg Prize for History for his book The Russo-Ukrainian War.

In 2025 Plokhy received an honorary degree from Oxford University.

In 2026 Plokhy received a Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from University of Aberdeen.

Books Plokhy, Serhii. The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine, Oxford University Press, 2002. Plokhy, Serhii. Tsars and Cossacks: A Study in Iconography, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 2003. Plokhy, Serhii and Frank E. Sysyn. Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2003. Plokhy, Serhii. Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History, University of Toronto Press, 2005. Plokhy, Serhii. The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Plokhy, Serhii. Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past , University of Toronto Press, 2008. Plokhy, Serhii. Yalta: The Price of Peace, Viking Adult, 2010. Plokhy, Serhii. The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires, Cambridge University Press, 2012. Plokhy, Serhii. The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. New York: Basic Books, 2014. 520 pp. $32.00 (cloth). Plokhy, Serhii. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. New York: Basic Books, 2015. — 395 pp.. Plokhy, Serhii. The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story. New York: Basic Books, 2016. — 384 pp.. Plokhy, Serhii. Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. New York: Basic Books, 2017. — 398 pp.. Plokhy, Serhii. Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, London: Allen Lane, 2018. Plokhy, Serhii. Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 369 p. Plokhy, Serhii. Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. Plokhy, Serhii, The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present, Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 2021. Plokhy, Serhii. Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disaster, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022. Plokhy, Serhii, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023 Plokhy, Serhii, Chernobyl Roulette: A War Story. United Kingdom: Allen Lane, 2024. Plokhy, Serhii, The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival. W. W. Norton & Company, 2025. Plokhy, Serhii, David and Goliath: Commentaries on the Russo-Ukrainian War. Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2026.