Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University. He teaches a variety of courses that include early modern and modern Jewish history; Jewish material culture; history and culture of Ukraine; and Slavic-Jewish literary encounters.

His research was supported by the DAAD Foundation, Rothschild Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Davis Center at Harvard University, Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Toronto, the Kosciuszko Foundation, Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, the Lady Davis Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

He has published more than a hundred articles and seven books and edited volumes, including The Jews in the Russian Army: Drafted into Modernity (2008, 2^nd ed. 2014); The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making of the Ukrainian Jew (2009); Lenin’s Jewish Question (2010); Jews and Ukrainians: Polin, vol. 26 (2011, co-edited with Antony Polonsky); Cultural Interference of Jews and Ukrainians: a Field in the Making (2014); The Golden-Age Shtetl: a New History of Jewish Life in East Europe, 2014, 2^nd ed. 2015); Jews and Ukrainians: a millennium of coexistence (2016, co-authored with Paul Robert Magocsi; 2^nd ed. 2018).