Event Videos — UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

In this talk, Dr. Tajiryan will briefly explore the importance of family firms in New Julfan history, the main caravan and maritime trade routes and the global circulation of luxury commodities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the lens of the commercial activities of the Minasian agents in the global exchange of diamonds and coral, this talk will situate New Julfans in the larger context of early modern Asian and global trade

Providing an overview of the structure, administration, life, and resistance in concentration camps based on Armenian accounts, Ottoman archives, and western diplomatic records, Mouradian argues that this glaring manifestation of total war, one directed towards the empire’s very own Armenian subjects, constitutes an important moment of transition in the use internment as a weapon of annihilation.

Harry Harootunian’s The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and its Unaccounted Lives is an attempt to reach an unattainable history by addressing the experience and memories of his parents, who escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916 and migrated to the United States to confront the magnitude of a second challenge of adaptation and economic security in an entirely different environment.

Dr. Lerna Ekmekcioglu and Dr. Melissa Bilal, through photographs, letters, and pages of sheet music, follow the story of a friendship between two Armenian women in Istanbul that endured the hardships of WWI, the Armenian Genocide, and early republican Turkey’s repressive minority politics.

In this lecture, Dr. Melissa Bilal talks about Mari Beylerian’s legacy as a staunch feminist writer, an activist committed to social justice, and a devoted pedagogue who disappeared amidst the horrors of the genocide.