Event Videos — UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

This international conference celebrates the bicentenary of the founding of Kolkata's famed Armenian College (est. 1821), one of three centers of Armenian higher learning in the diaspora during the nineteenth century and the only one that has survived and is thriving today. Bringing together economic, literary, legal, and cultural historians from India, Armenia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States, the conference highlights how, beginning in the early modern period and continuing to the present, Armenians have traveled to India to make its distant shores and cultures their own.

In this webinar, the Promise Armenian Institute marks the launch of a new digital exhibit at the Armenian Image Archive, which explores Kurkdjian’s stereoscopic images of Ani in 1881, taken over a period of five months after he was a photographer for the Russian Army. Dr. Joseph Malikian, curator of this new exhibit, will tell the story of Kurkdjian’s photographic expedition to Ani, and the opposition he encountered from the Russian authorities.

Dennis Papazian's journey is a classic American immigrant tale. Through it all, he shares his wit, resilience, keen sense of perception, and vision, as well as the memorable characters he meets along the way, as he reflects on his consequential, eventful, and at times surprising life. It is a story that will inspire and give hope to all who join him on his journey.

In this talk, Dr. Bertram describes how, with luggage filled with stories heard from their own family members, including those transmitted through the songs they sang, the dances they danced, the foods they made, and even through their screams in the night, pilgrims understood that they were visiting a sacred landscape, albeit one violated by the profane. In this fraught yet transcendent place, pilgrims invent a series of rituals so that village by village, town by town, or even house by house, they ritually connect with their own ancestors, and, as they stand on their own ancestral land, allow them to be a part of their personal story in the present.

Monday, April 18, 2022, 1:00pm EDT / 10:00am, PDTOn Zoom and the Promise Armenian Institute YouTube channel.PRESENTERROBERT SUKIASYAN, PhD, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Promise Armenian InstituteDISCUSSANTRUBEN SAFRASTYAN, PhD, Counselor of Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Armenian National Academy of SciencesDeportation and massacres were the principal methods of exterminating the Ottoman Armenians. In the case of Sivas province, which had one the largest Armenian populations in the empire, the vast majority of the deportees were killed on the way to the Syrian desert. The study of survivor memoirs sheds light on this process while at the same time describing the administration...