The Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, established in 2008 and sponsored by the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year. 

Greta Uehling’s scholarship is broadly concerned with international migration and forced displacement. Major projects have examined the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and the internally displaced. Her current project explores the subjective experience of military conflict and forced displacement in Ukraine. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, she documents how the military conflict reconfigured social worlds and how these social worlds became the site of a different, everyday kind of war.

Prior to teaching in the Program on International and Comparatives Studies, Uehling consulted with a number of international organizations including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Watson Institute at Brown University.

Everyday War provides an accessible lens through which to understand what noncombatant civilians go through in a country at war. What goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? In Ukraine, such questions have been part of the daily calculus of life. Greta Uehling engages with the lives of ordinary people living in and around the armed conflict over Donbas that began in 2014 and shows how conventional understandings of war are incomplete.

Read more about Everyday War at the Cornell University Press.

Watch her March 23, 2023 CREES Lecture here.