Writing. Convening. Teaching. Training. Modeling. Experimenting. Engaging. Across time zones and international boundaries, members of our community are at work. Our “Insights” gallery is a multimedia guide to intellectual life at the Davis Center.
Tehran has been a friendly partner for Central Asian countries since the 1990s, writes political scientist Nargis Kassenova. The new war in the Middle East has created threats for the wealthiest of them, Kazakhstan, including region-wide destabilization and disrupted trade with Gulf states.
In a career spanning more than 50 years, Harvard's Samuel Hazzard Cross Research Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, became internationally known for preserving the legacy of Russian modernism. His colleague Prof. William Todd pays tribute.
With Feb. 24 marking four years since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Davis Center hosted Ukrainian marine and former POW Yevhen Malik and Alexandra Vacroux of the Kyiv School of Economics for a discussion of how this war might end.
Christopher Conway (REECA, '26) and his co-authors show how Moscow has gone from banning Bitcoin to adopting crypto as a sanctions-evasion tool, while reshaping its financial and legal systems. To be successful, Western sanctions regimes will also have to adapt.
Whether traveling, volunteering, watching films, writing, or cooking, our bright young scholars spent vacation days connecting with Armenia, Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in our region.
Explore this strange sea’s waters, lands, and the pipelines, artwork, and scholarship criss-crossing them—all in the Winter 2026 issue of our Imperiia Project’s digital magazine.
While Russia still has a major impact on places once ruled from Moscow, these countries’ shared Soviet legacy does not determine their plans for the future. Big-picture reforms pursued by national elites vary hugely, writes our visiting scholar Irina Busygina, based on work by her team of student researchers.
The main theme will be environment, society, and power in the region. Submissions are welcome from any discipline and any level of graduate study. Deadline to apply is Feb. 9.
Reconstruction in Ukraine is already underway, despite ongoing fighting. Those involved are balancing urgent needs with long-term imperatives and completely new ways of working, writes Eve Blau, our faculty associate and a scholar of urban design.
