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 lectured on various 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, the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, and Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) Sofia.

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 (BBUI), 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.

Prof. Portnov is the member of the Ukrainian PEN, German Association for East European Studies (DGO), German Society of Historians of Eastern Europe (VOH), and German-Ukrainian Association (DUG). 

He is the author of more than 10 books and over 250 academic publications on the intellectual history of East Central Europe, history of totalitarianisms, Ukrainian historiography of the 20th century, the history of Polish-Ukrainian and German-Ukrainian relations, historical urban research, genocide, and memory studies.