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'.

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.

[2] Plokhy's books have been translated into a number of languages, including Albanian, Belarusian, Chinese (classical and simplified)[citation needed], Czech, Estonian, Greek, Finnish, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian, and won numerous awards and prizes.

[4] 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.

[5] 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.