Insights

Our library’s newest digitized archival resource offers a rare opportunity to explore the nobility’s final decades in the Russian empire, post-revolutionary exile in Europe, and Georgian diaspora life in the U.S.

The writer’s early immigrant years in Cambridge and Wellesley were formative for his American self—rich with discoveries, projects, and stories, writes Prof. Maxim D. Shrayer, a Nabokov scholar and Davis Center associate.

A major conference, co-organized by the Davis Center, considers how to rethink and revise historical narratives for a region that has traditionally been viewed as a realm of inter-imperial competition.

Prof. Grzegorz Ekiert highlights two exciting new initiatives and considers the challenges and promise of the 2025-2026 academic year.

A newly published study from Davis Center instructor George Soroka investigates how Russians and Ukrainians differed in their perceptions of Soviet-era history prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, providing an important baseline for interpreting shifts since then.

Bringing educational backgrounds from anthropology and literature to political science and public relations, the REECA class of 2027 has come to campus.

Dr. Steven Solnick will begin in his new role next month, bringing 35+ years of leadership experience in education and philanthropy and building on a decades-long connection to Harvard and the Davis Center.

Since 2018, our alumna Alisa Sopova and photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind have been documenting ordinary Ukrainian lives transformed—but not defined—by the violence of Russia’s invasion. Now all the work from their visual storytelling project, “5K From the Frontline,” has a new home online.

Far from being the sudden product of a late-life religious crisis, Tolstoy’s theory of radical nonviolence stemmed from views that had remained remarkably consistent since the 1860s, writes our 2025 Kathryn W. Davis Prize winner Anya Tseitlin.