Oleg Budnitskii is currently a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, and from 2011-2023 was the founding director of the International Centre for the History and Sociology of WWII and its Consequences/Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the National Research University–Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

He is the author or coauthor of nine books, and editor or coeditor of 27 other volumes on imperial Russian, Soviet, and modern Jewish history. His most recent books are War, Conquest, and Catastrophe (Jews in the Soviet Union: A History, 1939–1945) (2022, co-authored with David Engel, Gennady Estraikh, and Anna Shternshis) and Another Russia: Studies in the History of the Russian Emigration (2021, in Russian).

Budnitskii is on the editorial boards of The Russian Review and East European Jewish Affairs. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including fellowships and grants from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Fulbright Program, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, MacArthur Foundation, and IREX.