1. 80 Years since Auschwitz: An Evening of Musical Commemoration of the Holocaust
On January 27, 2025, the Harriman Institute and the Barnard Music Program hosted an event with Alexandra Birch (Mellon Teaching Fellow, Harriman Institute; Lecturer in History) and Jui-Ling Hsu, who presented a musical commemoration of the Holocaust. In addition to a fragment of a lost prewar violin sonata by composer Viktor Ullmann, who was murdered at Auschwitz, this program included the first sonata of Sergei Prokofiev, reconceived as a musical memorial for murdered Soviet World War II POWs; sound recordings from Auschwitz-Birkenau taken in 2024; a sonically vivid piece by the Ukrainian-Jewish violinist Emil Leyvand; and the first violin sonata of the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who fled to the Soviet Union in 1939. The program remembered the murdered and persecuted artists of the Holocaust as artists, rather than as victims. It also provided a more complete picture of the Holocaust, aiming to tell the story of a handful of individuals facing incomprehensible violence.
Learn more here.
2. Nuclear Colonialism in Kazakhstan: Domestic and Regional Implications
On March 6, 2025, the Harriman Institute and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute hosted a panel discussion examining the long-term consequences of Soviet nuclear weapons tests at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. The speakers were part of a research group from Karaganda Buketov University (Kazakhstan), whose research addresses such issues as the impact of these tests on the health and well-being of local communities, a comparative analysis of nuclear test sites worldwide, and the contributions of domestic scientists to understanding and mitigating the consequences of nuclear tests.
Learn more here.
3. Harriman Carnegie Corporation Russian Studies Capstone Conference
In the fall of 2016, the Harriman Institute launched a Russian Studies and Policy Program with a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The program was designed to expand the study of Russia across the social sciences and in the greater New York area. On September 18, the Institute celebrated completion of the program with a conference that gathered top experts of Russian and Eurasian studies, reflections on the political economy of Russia, new research agendas and topics, and how Russia’s war on Ukraine impacts institutions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Robert Legvold (Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science) delivered keynote remarks and received a Distinguished Scholar Award and Named Fellowship from the Harriman Institute (see here for details).
Learn more here.
Robert Legvold holding a gift from a former student—”East Riders” on the open road, an image created with the help of AI featuring Legvold on a motorcycle alongside the late former Harriman Institute director Marshall Shulman.
4. Through Protest to Reform: Euromaidan and Decentralization in Ukraine
Anastasiia Vlasenko (Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Ukrainian Studies, Harriman Institute) appeared at a Director’s Seminar on October 3, 2025 to discuss her research on how the Euromaidan movement reshaped power dynamics in Ukraine and led to sweeping decentralization reform. Drawing on rich local-level data, Vlasenko’s study uncovered a fascinating paradox: communities touched by protest often moved more slowly to adopt decentralization than did other communities. However, once they did, they used it more effectively. The talk offered fresh insight into how collective action can rewrite the rules of governance from the bottom up. (See here for Vlasenko’s essay on participatory democracy in Ukraine).
Learn more here.
5. Revolutionary Yugoslavia: Partisan Art, Archives and Film
On October 11, 2025 the Njegoš Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture and the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute held a symposium exploring the cultural and political legacies of the revolutionary Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia through the lenses of art, archives, and film. Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the defeat of fascism in 1945, the symposium examined how creative practices that fused art and activism, both official and grassroots, shaped partisan antifascist struggle, socialist revolution, and reconstruction, as well as their contested afterlives. The event was organized by Columbia’s Aleksandar Bošković (Senior Lecturer in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian), Amir Husak (Assistant Professor of Media Studies, The New School), Dijana Jelača (Lecturer in Cinema Studies in the Department of Film, Brooklyn College), and Nace Zavrl (doctoral candidate in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University).
Learn more here.◆
Revolutionary Yugoslavia symposium participants gathered around a poster advertising the conference.
Featured image: (Left to right) Jack Snyder, Timothy Frye, Robert Legvold, and Alexander Cooley at the Harriman Carnegie Corporation Russian Studies Capstone Conference.
