Dmytro Ostapenko' research interests relate to agricultural history of Australia and labour history. Apart from completing a PhD at La Trobe in 2012 he also holds a post-graduate research degree in History from a Ukrainian university and published more than a dozen papers in Ukrainian and Russian academic journals in the late 1990s-early 2000s before arriving in Australia. He currently works on Diane Kirkby's ARC-Linkage Project on the internationalisation of organised maritime labour.