Professor Vushko specializes in the history of modern Eastern Europe. A native of Ukraine, she received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2008 and held several postdoctoral fellowships in Europe and at Harvard. Her first monograph, The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772-1867, was published in 2015 with Yale University Press. The book won the 2016 Kulczycki Prize for the best monograph in any areas of Polish studies and was shortlisted for the 2016 Joseph Rothschild Book Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies. She is currently finishing the second book titled The Lost Fatherland: Europeans between Empire and Nation States, 1867-1939. At the center of this study are twenty-one individuals who came of age in the Austrian Empire, survived the First World War and then continued to politics and government in different states across Europe: Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Her next book project is provisionally tiled “The Game Tower: Political Prison in the Austrian Empire and Beyond (1620s – 1940s).” It is an analysis of the Spielberg Castle in the city of Brno, now the Czech Republic, which served as a major political prison in the Austrian Empire between the 1620 and 1867, an internment camp during WWI between 1914 and 1918, and a Nazi camp in Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1939.

At Princeton, Vushko teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Eastern Europe and political prison in modern Europe.