Serhii Plokhy Explained

Serhii Plokhy
Native Name Lang:uk
Birth Date:1957 5, df=yes
Birth Place:Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality:Ukrainian
Occupation:Historian
Known For:History of Ukraine, Cold War

Serhii Mykolayovych Plokhy (Ukrainian: Сергій Миколайович Плохій; born 23 May 1957) is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Personal background

Serhii Plokhy was born in Nizhnii Novgorod (then called Gorky), Russia, to Ukrainian parents. He spent his childhood and school years in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, where his family returned soon after his birth.[1]

Educational background

Plokhy received his undergraduate degree in history and social sciences from theUniversity of Dnipropetrovsk (1980), where he studied under professors Mykola Kovalskyi and Yuriy Mytsyk, and his graduate degree from the Russian Universityof the Friendship of Peoples (1982), specializing in historiographyand source studies. He received his habilitation degree in historyfrom Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1990.[2]

Professional background

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.

Plokhy's research and writing deal with the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with special emphasis on Ukraine. His first monograph, The Papacy and Ukraine, was among the few books published in the Soviet Union to deal with the history of the papacy as an academic subject rather than an object of atheistic propaganda. Among Plokhy's best known contributions to the study of early modern history is The Origins of the Slavic Nations, a broad survey of the history of the region which rejects primordialist ideas that postulate the existence of either one or three—Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian—East Slavic nationalities before the rise of nationalism. Instead, it proposes an alternative scheme of the development of pre-modern identities of the Eastern Slavs.

Plokhy's research on the history of the Cold War era resulted in the publication of Yalta: The Price of Peace and The Last Empire, where Plokhy challenged the interpretation of the collapse of the Soviet Union as an American victory in the Cold War, instead arguing Ukraine and Russia were the two republics responsible for the end of the Soviet Union.

Honors and awards

Plokhy’sbooks have been translated into a number of languages, including Albanian, Belarusian, Chinese (classical and simplified), Czech, Estonian, Greek, Finnish, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian,Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian, and won numerous awards and prizes.

The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union won the 2015 Lionel Gelber Prize for the world's best non-fiction book in English on global issues and the 2015 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize. Chernobyl won the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize (formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize).[3] 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.[4]

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.[5] In 2015 Serhii Plokhy received the Antonovych prize,[6] and in 2018 the Shevchenko National Prize (Ukraine).[7]

Published works

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. News: Serhii Plokhii named to history chair at Harvard University. Woloschuk, Peter. The Ukrainian Weekly. 10, 17. April 15, 2007. 2010-10-29.
  2. Web site: Serhii Plokhii | HAA Travels - Study Leaders | Harvard Alumni Association | Harvard Alumni Affairs & Development (AA&D). Alumni.harvard.edu. 2010-10-29.
  3. Web site: Serhii Plokhy's Chernobyl wins The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, 2018 . Baillie Gifford Prize . November 14, 2018 . November 15, 2018.
  4. Web site: Disaster by Design . Mathew. Tobie. Literary Review. May 2018 . 28 February 2023.
  5. http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/gelber/media_release/2015_Winner_Press_Release.html 2015 Gelber Prize Winner Press Release
  6. Web site: Serhii Plokhy honored with Antonovych Award. The Ukrainian Weekly. November 20, 2015. Yaro. Bihun. January 1, 2022.
  7. Web site: Serhii Plokhii Wins Prestigious Shevchenko National Prize. huri.harvard.edu. February 15, 2018. January 1, 2022.
  8. Book: Chernobyl : history of a tragedy. Plokhy, Serhii. 9780241349038. London. 1032170907. 2018-05-15.
  9. Web site: Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy review – death of the Soviet dream. Groskop. Viv. 2018-05-20. the Guardian. en. 2018-05-24.