Ph.D, Yale University

Iryna Vushko is an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University with the focus on Eastern Europe, the Austrian Empire and successor states. She is the author of two books: The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772-1867 (Yale University Press, 2015), and Lost Fatherland: Europeans between Empire and Nation States, 1867-1939 (Yale University Press, 2024).

She is currently working on two book projects. One is “The Empire of Fear: Political Crime and Political Detainment in the Austrian Empire and beyond, 1620-1945.” It is a history of political crime and political detainment in the Austrian Empire and interwar Europe between the religious wars in the early seventeenth century and the end of WWII. It is an analysis of the practices of law through the history of a place – the Spielberg fortress in Brno in Moravia, now the Czech Republic, that served as the major political prison in the Austrian Empire and became the first Nazi internment camp in Czechoslovakia. The second book project is tentatively titled “From Austrian Coffee-Shop to American Nuclear Workshop: Lwów School of Math and the American Hydrogen Bomb.” It revolves around Stanisław Adam Ulam, a native of Lwów in interwar Poland (today’s L’viv in Ukraine), and one of the members of the Lwów school of math, who became one of the founding fathers of the hydrogen bomb in post-1945 America.

At Princeton, she is teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on Eastern Europe, political prison, and Ukraine.