Prior Years — Armenian Genocide

In this webinar, educators will learn about the impact of genocide denial and distortion on Armenian Genocide education as well as strategies on how to integrate testimony into the classroom to develop students' agency and resilience to misinformtaion.

Dr. Elyse Semerdjian will discuss her book Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide wherein tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal the larger history of gender and genocide. In this talk she will focus her discussion on contextualizing a single 1919 humanitarian portrait of a young woman named Mariam Azarian.

Edited by Hans-Lukas Kieser, Seyhan Bayraktar, and Khatchig Mouradian, After the Ottomans: Genocide’s Long Shadow and Armenian Resistance (I.B. Tauris, 2023), presents the work of eleven scholars of history, anthropology, literature, and political science exploring the Ottoman Armenians not only as the major victims of the First World War and the post-war treaties, but also as agents striving for survival, writing history, transmitting the memory and searching for justice.

Peter Balakian will discuss the book of poems Bloody News from My Friend by Siamanto (1878-1915). Dr. Diran Balakian, Peter Balakian’s grandfather, at the time of the 1909 Adana massacres was working as a physician tending to the wounded and was also an eyewitness to the atrocities.

Dr. Khatchig Mouradian is the author of the award-winning book The Resistance Network:The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (Michigan State University Press, 2021).

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.

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.