Prof. Dr. Andrii Portnov

Historian, who graduated from Dnipro University (History) and Warsaw University (Cultural Studies) and defended his PhD thesis at the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Lviv. Since 2012, he has been working in Germany, where he came as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Since 2012 he lectured on various Ukrainian and East-Central European topics at the Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin, the Universities of Basel and Potsdam, the Free University of Brussels, SciencesPo Lyon, and others. He was also a research fellow at Univesity of Geneva, Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (CERCEC) in Paris, Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, and the Historisches Kolleg in Munich.

From 2018 to 2025, he was Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder). In 2015, he initiated and co-founded a Berlin-Brandenburg Ukraine Initiative, which in 2016 became the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin. In July 2023, he was elected full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Free University.

For his Ukrainian-language book “Histories for Home Use”, he was awarded the Yuri Shevelov Prize in 2013, and for “Dnipro. An Entangled History of a European City” he received an Ab Imperio Book Prize in 2023. In 2022 Prof. Portnov was awarded the DIALOG Prize of the German-Polish Society.

He is the author of more than 10 books and over 250 academic publications on the intellectual history of East Central Europe, Ukrainian historiography, the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations, German-language Ukraine studies, historical urban research, genocide, and memory studies. His synthesis on Polish-Ukrainian history was published in four languages, and his most recent book publication is an introduction in Ukrainian studies in German: “Ukraine-Studien. Einführung” (2025).