Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard and the director of the university's Ukrainian Research Institute. In June 2013 he was named Walter Channing Cabot Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

He has served on the advisory committees of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. He also serves on the editorial boards of Russian History, East European Politics and Societies, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, and the Journal of Ukrainian Studies.

Plokhy is the author of nine books, including The Last Empire and Yalta, which won the Ukrainian National Women's League of America Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Foundation Prize and won the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize.