Serhii Plokhy no longer heads the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard

Ukrainian-American historian Serhii Plokhy will no longer be the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI).

“It has been a privilege and an honor to lead the Institute over the past twelve years. Years marked by the anxiety and challenges of war, but also by the opportunities that institutions like HURI offer to advance what Harvard’s motto calls ‘good knowledge’ about Ukraine and the region.

“I want to thank my colleagues at the Institute for working together to strengthen our existing programs and to create and develop new ones. I’m also grateful to everyone here on social media who has helped us achieve our goals,” Plokhy wrote in his farewell message.

Plokhy noted that in the period between 2021 and 2024, the team of the institution was able not only to strengthen existing programs, but also to establish new ones. In his statement, he thanked his colleagues for their collaboration, as well as everyone who supported HURI’s mission.

“Last but not least, many thanks and all the best wishes to my colleague Terry Martin, who will lead the Institute in the coming academic year. I will do my best to support him and the HURI staff in continuing the Institute’s mission in the months and years ahead,” Plokhy wrote.

Serhii Plokhy is a professor of Ukrainian history and former director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He taught in Canada, where he served as deputy director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research and founded the “Religion and Culture” research program at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.

Plokhy is the author of more than ten books on the history of Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine,” “The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union,” “Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters,” and “Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe.” In 2018, he was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine for “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.”

As reported earlier, in 2024 HURI launched a database of online, open-access resources for original research on the history of Ukraine.

In 2025, Serhii Plokhii received an honorary degree from Oxford University.

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Main image: Kateryna Moskaliuk/Lokalna istoria

Copy editing: Ben Angel