The Davis Center’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program offers a unique opportunity for promising scholars to dedicate focused time to their research while benefiting from access to Harvard’s extensive academic resources. This year, we are delighted to welcome postdocs whose scholarly pursuits have been nurtured by the university in years past from the fields of history, political science, and literature and culture:
- Sophia Kalashnikova Horowitz (History), a longtime graduate student associate of the Davis Center, received her Ph.D. from Harvard’s History Department in spring 2026. Her research examines the social and institutional history of Soviet informing to the political police under Stalin and Khrushchev. Her current book project has involved work in the archives of Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Germany, and Georgia. She looks forward to attending Harvard's regional history kruzhok and birding at Mt. Auburn Cemetery.
- Jane Kitaevich (Political Science) completed her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and is returning to the Davis Center after graduating from its REECA Master’s Program in 2014. She examines how conflict violence shapes public opinion and grassroots political behavior, with a particular focus on support for democracy and protest mobilization. She is a broad comparativist with primary regional expertise in the South Caucasus. Jane especially enjoys mentoring students and is excited to be a resource to current REECAns.
- Hana Stankova (Literature and Culture) received her Ph.D. from Yale University in Slavic languages and literatures and earned her bachelor's from Harvard College in 2017. Hana is a literary historian with a focus on 19th-century travel writing about Central Asia. Her first book project analyzes patterns across 100+ texts about the region by writers from Russia, Europe, America, and Central Asia itself. She is looking forward to re-discovering Widener Library and seeing how the Davis Center's resources for studying Central Asia and the Caucasus have expanded since she was an undergraduate in 2013-2017.
These fellows, selected through a highly competitive process, will spend nine months in residence. During this time, the program provides an intellectual home where they can pursue their research among a vibrant scholarly community, where fellows learn from one another, engage with the broader Harvard network, and contribute to the center’s ongoing academic initiatives, deepening understanding of the regions central to our mission.
We look forward to a year of collaboration, rich intellectual exchange, and fresh perspectives, anticipating the many contributions these three scholars will bring to the Davis Center community.
For those who are interested in potentially pursuing a postdoc with the Davis Center, we invite you to read through the Postdoctoral Fellowship web page. Applications for academic year 2027-2028 will open by early November. Any questions may be directed to research programs coordinator Kate Flaherty at kflaherty@fas.harvard.edu.
Research Programs Coordinator
