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.
Learn about its winding journey — through censorship, fire, and revolution — from our Georgia scholars. And come see it for yourself at Houghton Library, on display until April 24!
Our REECA student Alice Volfson — who investigates how Soviet Central Asian writers used state-run international conferences to critique the regime — interviews one of Kazakhstan’s most prominent poet-intellectuals.
For our Program on Central Asia, former U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan John O'Keefe recalls negotiations with Bishkek for the use of Manas Airport as a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan after 9/11.
The historian and Atlantic magazine staff writer weighs Ukraine’s future amid widespread threats to global stability — the third talk of a speaker series cohosted at Harvard by the Davis Center, the Ukrainian Research Institute and the Center for European Studies.
Mark Kramer, director of our Cold War Studies program, describes how the 1956 denunciation of Stalin reverberated through Poland’s Communist leadership, accelerating the distribution of a text that was supposed to have stayed secret.
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.
