A historian Oleh Razyhrayev studies the history of Volhynia and East Halychyna of the first half of the 20th century. In 2009, he gained a scholarly degree of the Candidate in History at Lesia Ukrainka Volyn National University in Lutsk. In 2010, he gained a degree of the Doctor of Humanities in History at the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University (Lublin, Poland). At the end of 2015, he was awarded the academic title of Associate Professor; in March 2021 he started working as a research fellow at the Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw).

Oleh Razyhrayev participated in many group grant projects, such as “Society of the Second Polish Republic” (2010–2013, Institute of History of the PAS, Poland); “Reunion Through Difficult Memories. Volyn 1943”: a public educational Polish-Ukrainian project (2012, Lublin, Poland); “The First World War in Polish Lands. Expectations – Experience – Consequences” (2014–2018, Institute of History at PAS, Poland); “The Face of Social Rebellion in the Second Polish Republic During the Great Depression (1930–1935)” (2014–2019, Wroclaw University, Poland); an individual grant from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in 2016–2017. Since 2017, Oleh Razyhrayev has participated in scholarly workshops and publication series of the Institute of National Memory of Poland about the communist movement and eastern voivodeships in the Second Polish Republic. Since April 2018, he has participated in a research program “Victims of the Polish-Ukrainian Confrontation, 1939–1947” (Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv). Since May 2020, he has been enrolled in the educational course on the “Genocide of the Jews of Europe: a Historical Perspective and Approaches to Research” (Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies).

He had his internship at Jagiellonian University (2014 ), at the Ukrainian Catholic University (2018-2019), and at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (2021).
During his residency in Lviv, Oleh Razyhrayev will work on his doctoral thesis on the history of the penitentiary system in Volyn and in East Halychyna in the inter-war period. In his study of criminal and political prisoners in East Halychyna between the two world wars, the historian will focus on the classification of inmates, the process of their getting to prisons, and the adaptation to the new reality. He will highlight the aspects related to catering, labour, education, and religious practices of inmates. He will study the causes and ways to escape from prison; contacts of prisoners with their families and NGOs; and challenges of post-penitentiary life.