FEATURED SPEAKER:

Boris Adjemian, Director of the AGBU Nubar Library, Paris. He holds a PhD in history from EHESS and Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale.” He is the co-editor of the academic journal Études arméniennes contemporaines and an affiliated researcher to the Centre de recherches historiques (CNRS, EHESS). His most recent book is La Bibliothèque et le survivant: un intellectuel arménien au siècle des génocides (Paris, Anamosa, 2025).

The history of the Nubar Library, founded in Paris in 1927, is inextricably linked to that of its first librarian, Aram Andonian. A former Armenian journalist and writer from Constantinople and a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Andonian became the linchpin of this new institution which, in the inter-war period, worked to ensure the cultural survival of a people in exile. He and the Library were one until his death in 1951. This lecture will focus in particular on the little-known episode of the looting of the Nubar Library by the Nazis in 1941, through a reading of a unique source, Aram Andonian’s unpublished diary.

CO-SPONSORS:

Ararat-Eskijian Museum

NAASR

Society for Armenian Studies

Promise Armenian Institute