The Black Sea is a place of contradictions: an “inhospitable sea” that has welcomed seafarers for millennia, lifeless depths that can preserve human artifacts for 2,400 years. It may be a “whole shore sunk in dreams” for a poet, a “geopolitical energy geography” for a military strategist. Today it is both a site of global conflict and a critical node in vast economic networks. It is also a fount of art, scholarship, and opportunities for escaping linear thinking.
The latest issue of our Imperiia Project’s online quarterly, DeCode, delivers this strange sea to your doorstep, its pages filled with the voices of scholars, photographers, and spatial storytellers. From interactive maps and urban graffiti to photo essays and network visualizations, we invite you to explore every page or just home in on some of the sections highlighted below. As Imperiia director and digital historian Kelly O’Neill likes to say when encouraging readers to poke around: “We promise you can’t break anything.”
The Black Sea Lab
The Black Sea Lab is an exploratory collaboration to address decades of academic neglect that have stunted our understanding of the sea and its littoral states as an interconnected region. Over the past year, the lab’s core team—including Dr. O’Neill, Natia Chankvetadze, Nargis Kassenova, and Mark Kramer—has explored new avenues for research by convening architects, mathematicians, geographers, historians, literary scholars, and others. The group has expanded far beyond the Davis Center’s research initiatives, bringing in experts from across Harvard and other institutions. Together, they are building a framework to analyze how risk—whether political, social, economic, cultural, or environmental—transcends national borders in a region where the only stable feature seems to be upheaval. Along the way, they are asking (and answering) a fundamental question: What does it mean to be a “region” in the globalized 21st century?
Mapping the Veins of Power
Shorelines on a map can be deceptive, conveying a certainty that doesn’t exist in the water—and revealing nothing of what lies beneath it. Digital cartographer Gökçen Erkılıç maps the Black Sea’s invisible infrastructures—pipelines, cables, and legal regimes—that define modern power. Her work helps us to better understand how the sea fits into a much broader region shaped by extraction, transport, regulation, negotiation, and conflict.
Art DeCoded: From Mosaics to Soot
Three art projects to choose from—or, better yet, explore them all:
- Incremental Sea: Drawing on centuries of mapwork and artwork, REECA student Olive Coles (‘26) and Dr. O’Neill have brought to life a set of meditations on the Black Sea. A mosaic diptych, on display at the Davis Center, uses details from 34 historical maps to represent not just the coast but the water, and the transitional space in-between. Exploring the project online adds layers, including literary “increments”—snippets from the prose and poetry of generations of authors bearing the sea’s imprint.
- Black Sea Frames: Curated with care by Olive and REECA alum Julian Gonzales-Poirier (‘25), this community photo bank moves beyond the scholarly lens to capture people’s intimate connections with the shoreline, from sun-warmed bodies and the joys of a river to muddy tracks and landscapes now scarred by war.
- The Lamb and the Black Spot: Renowned Georgian street artist Mishiko “LAMB” Sulakauri brings playful yet biting political critique to our pages. DeCode highlights his project “Black Spot,” which involved using paper to collect sooty deposits from the exhaust pipes of Tbilisi buses and mailing this monochromatic “collage” to the mayor in protest of urban pollution, as well as the street-art tour of Georgia’s capital that he gave to a group of Harvard undergrads brought there by our Program on Georgian Studies.
The Next Generation: REECA Alumni
The future of Black Sea studies is already being written by our recent REECA graduates. Julian, in an essay inspired by his work with the Black Sea Lab, describes the way that the initiative’s interdisciplinary approach—centering risk and geography instead of national boundaries—encouraged him to move past outdated intellectual frameworks and think along lines very different from the ones drawn by his earlier academic experience.
In its “Wisdom in Practice” section, the magazine also catches up with:
- Davit Gasparyan (‘24): Davit, who contributed to Imperiia digital mapping projects like “Odes(s)a in Bloom” and “Up in Flames,” is now researching middle powers, with a particular focus on Türkiye, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
- Emily Hackett (‘25): This fall, Emily—an energetic convener in Harvard’s Slavic-language community—began her doctoral studies in history at the University of Chicago, where she continues her work on interwar Czechoslovakia and Ukraine, cultural diplomacy, migration, and other topics in 20th-century Eastern Europe and beyond.
Explore, enjoy, and help keep the Black Sea where it belongs: right at the center of multiple conversations at once.
