Harriman Institute Oral History - Incite at Columbia University

Since 2015, the Harriman Institute Oral History has gathered the voices of directors, professors, and affiliates who shaped its role in area studies and U.S. policy toward Russia and Eurasia. Now, as the Institute turns 80, we're resuming the work —documenting how war, funding cuts, and political pressure are reshaping the field. 

Ahead of its 70th anniversary, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, in collaboration with Columbia Oral History (COH, then known as CCOHR) and the Incite Institute, embarked on an oral history project to document the Institute's substantive role in area studies and academia, and its influence on the making of U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union, Russia, and Eurasia. This first phase, which ended in 2018, recorded nearly seventy-five hours of oral history with twenty-six individuals—directors, professors, staff, and senior affiliates of the Harriman Institute.

Rather than a conventional year-by-year history of the Institute, the project set out to understand three things: the Harriman Institute's changing imprint as a source of policy advice and influence in government; its capacity to promote and sustain the relevance of area studies as a tool for training new generations of decision-makers, regional experts, and diplomats; and its role in shaping academic fields such as nationality studies and human rights. The result is a powerful analytical and public record of achievements, challenges, limitations, and lessons learned, accessible on the Harriman Institute Oral History website.

The Phase I interviews generated a rich collection of narratives that elicited strong interest from Eurasia scholars and peer institutes when presented at a conference at George Washington University in 2018, and the Harriman Institute received positive attention for being among the first of its peers to conduct such an oral history. 

The collection speaks to the Institute’s uniqueness and importance among peer institutions—its longevity, its networks, its deep expertise—and beyond documenting the Institute's history, has become an important primary source for scholars and a teaching resource for faculty. The narrators spanned generations and disciplines, and they varied in their relation to the Harriman, resulting in interviews that  contextualized the Harriman’s role not only on campus, but also in the city, the nation, and the world.

Looking Ahead: Phase II

As the Harriman Institute prepares to celebrate its 80th anniversary in the 2026–2027 academic year, we are building on this first phase of work through a continued collaboration. Phase II, which began in Fall 2026, is an update to Phase I and a deepening of the subjects covered by the initial narrators.

This is especially urgent now, given two major disruptions the Harriman has faced over the past decade: Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its ripple effects on area studies, and sustained cuts to funding and adversarial positions toward university-based expertise and academia more broadly. Documenting the transformative effects of these forces while the experiences remain fresh in the minds of Harriman faculty, alumni, and affiliates is a central goal of this current phase.