Wednesday, May 11, 2022, at 7:30pm ET/4:30pm PT
On Zoom and NAASR's YouTube channel Armenian Studies.

PRESENTER
DR. CAREL BERTRAM, Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University

In her new book, "A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory" (Stanford University Press), Carel Bertram draws the reader into the experiences of Armenian travelers to Western or Historical Armenia as they search for the towns and villages lost to their own families the during the Armenian genocide that began in 1915. She suggests that it was these personal places that truly defined homeland for them, based in part on the perennial question they asked each other in their diasporic hostlands, namely: “Where are you from?” Their answers might be places such as Husenig or Van or Malatya. But while traveling in the Homeland itself, the question was often deflected back to the travelers’ diasporic or hostland homes (in America or elsewhere), at which point their answers might be given as Belmont, Detroit, or Pasadena.

In this talk, Bertram discusses how travelers came to experience these two landscapes not merely together, but as mirrors, or as parallel or overlapping maps. She uses their conversations and their memories of homeland-related recipes and music to show how, during their travels, this sensibility was activated and nurtured in ways that impacted their understanding and experiences of homeland in powerful ways.

CO-SPONSORS
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)
Society for Armenian Studies (SAS)

Purchase A House in the Homeland from the NAASR Bookstore.