Event Videos — UCLA Richard Hovannisian Chair in Modern Armenian History

The Horrors of Adana offers one of the first close examinations of these events, analyzing sociopolitical and economic transformations that culminated in a cataclysm of violence. Drawing on primary sources in a dozen languages, he develops an interdisciplinary approach to understand the rumors and emotions, public spheres and humanitarian interventions that together informed this complex event.

Professor Ron Suny, emeritus of the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan -- and author of a major study of the massacres and deportations committed by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, "They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015) -- uses the insights of Moses' work to take a fresh look at the Armenian tragedy and how it provides another lens to look at the concept of genocide.

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.

The Armenian contribution to Ottoman photography is supposedly well known, with histories documenting the famous studios of the imperial capital, Ottoman Armenian-run establishments that produced Orientalist visions for tourists and images of modernity for a domestic elite.

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.

Having launched a new exhibit from the Armenian Image Archive, the panelists explore the fourteen "Stations of the Cross" along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, highlighting photographs from the Bonfils Studio in 1875 and new images from photographer Jack Persekian.

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...

This webinar includes an introduction to the Armenian Image Archive (AIA) by Carla Garapedian, Ph.D., a survey by Joseph Malikian, Ph.D., of early Armenian photography which will be a focus of research in the AIA, and a presentation of Asadour Guzelian’s photographs, taken on his two trips to Armenia in 1988 and 1989.