Event Videos (2020–2025) — #Society for Armenian Studies

Organized and hosted by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS) with respect and gratitude for Prof. Hovannisian’s immeasurable contributions as a scholar, mentor, and leader.

This talk by Hazal Özdemir expands the category of anti-Armenian violence in the Hamidian era to contain the denaturalization of targeted populations and methods devised to control their movements, such as photo registers. It will focus on the Armenian mobility between the Ottoman Empire and the United States between 1896-1908.

This talk by Nora Lessersohn introduces the life and work of Christopher Oscanyan (1818-1895), one of the first known Armenian-Americans, and his efforts to connect the U.S. with the Ottoman Empire—especially its Armenian Christian population.

Online panel discussion of the current blockade of Artsakh (2023) and apparent global indifference.

In this talk, Dr. Ümit Kurt explores Mimaroğlu’s biography including his relationship with the Armenian journalist and professor Diran Kelekian, who was arrested by his former student Mimaroğlu in April 1915 and killed; examine the continuation of a genocidal regime in the modern Turkish Republic and how genocidaires such as Mimaroğlu constituted core elements of the new state; and explore what kinds of administrative/bureaucratic mechanisms made the Armenian Genocide possible and how technocrats like Mustafa Reşat, taking charge of these mechanisms, facilitated the genocide for political decision-makers.

The lessons Dr. Pamela Steiner has taken about what might be needed to achieve something positive among Armenians, Turks and Azerbaijanis is pulled together in her recent interdisciplinary book, Collective Trauma and the Armenian Genocide: Armenian, Turkish and Azerbaijani Relations Since 1839.

In this talk, Dr. Carel Bertram discusses how travelers came to experience these two landscapes (hostland/diasporic home and homeland) 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.

Dr. Bedross Der Matossian presents his book The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century.

The boundaries between the Iranian and Armenian worlds were porous in many ways. The Armenian presence in Iran is attested from the Achaemenid centuries to the present. Although the Armenian Iranian community has decreased significantly since the nineteenth century, it still constitutes the most significant Christian element in Iran, finding means to preserve in large measure its religion, language, and traditions and to navigate between Armenian and Iranian identities.

Kindred Voices explores how the region’s Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multi-religious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities.