Patricia Kennedy Grimsted received her doctorate in Russian History from the University of California (Berkeley), and taught at several universities. Based on extensive research experience in the Soviet Union, sponsored by the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), she compiled a series of Soviet archival directories, and research guides, while a Research Associate at HURI and Harvard’s Russian Center, with grants from NEH and other sources. Following her major Ukrainian archival directory (1988), after Independence, she advised Ukrainian archivists on their website sequel and archival-Ukrainica abroad. She collaborated with Ukrainian and Polish archivists on analytic guides to the Lithuanian Metrica (1984) and Ruthenian Metrica (2002). Together with Russian archivists during the 1990s, she compiled a computerized Directory and Bibliographic Guide to Russian Archives (Russian, 1997; English, 2000). She continues to oversee the online English sequel, ArcheoBiblioBase, developed by the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam, where she is an Honorary Fellow), now hosted by EastView Information Services.

As a major authority on World War II displaced cultural valuables, her monograph Trophies of War and Empire, The Archival Legacy of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution (2001); was followed collaboratively by Returned from Russia: Nazi Plunder of Archives in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues (2007/2013); and subsequent studies of displaced Nazi-looted archives, books, and art. As consultant for the Jewish Claims Conference, she is currently updating her Guide to the Dispersed Archives and Loot of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), covering holdings in ten countries, and adjacent websites on looted libraries. At HURI she is researching Ukrainian wartime art losses and the provenance and fate of Reichskommisar Erich Koch’s personal collection of looted art.

Among other honors, in 2002, she was awarded the AAASS Distinguished Contribution to Slavic Studies.