Prior Years — #ColumbiaArmenianCenter

Thursday, March 25, 2020, 7:00-8:30 pm Columbia University, Knox Hall, Room 208 606 West 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027 Between 1885 and 1915, roughly eighty thousand Armenians migrated between the Ottoman Empire and North America. For much of this period, Ottoman state authorities viewed Armenian migrants, particularly those who returned to the empire after sojourns abroad, as a political threat to the empire’s security. In response, Istanbul worked vigorously to prevent Armenians both from migrating to and returning from North America. In response dense smuggling networks emerged to assist migrants in bypassing this migration ban. The dynamics that shaped the evolution...

POSTPONED to Fall 2020 ISLAM IN ARMENIAN LITERARY CULTURE 7th to 21st Centuries, with Seta Dadoyan Unique patterns of interaction and development distinguished the Armenian experience in the world of Islam from the beginning, yet a large body of the record in the entire Armenian literature remains not only barely studied but also unavailable to scholars in Near/Middle Eastern and interfaith studies. Based on the primary and secondary material from the 660s to the present she has gathered and made available (in her translations), professor Seta B. Dadoyan traces novel paradigms of mutual perceptions and interactions in dynamic historical development...

Thursday, February 27, 2020, 6:10-7:30 pm Columbia University Knox Hall, Room 208 606 W 122nd St, New York, NY 10027 Three of the formative revolutions that shook the early twentieth-century world occurred almost simultaneously in regions bordering each other. Though the Russian, Iranian, and Young Turk Revolutions all exploded between 1904 and 1911, they have never been studied through their linkages until now. Roving Revolutionaries probes the interconnected aspects of these three revolutions through the involvement of the Armenian revolutionaries—minorities in all of these empires—whose movements and participation within and across frontiers tell us a great deal about the global...

Thursday, February 13, 2020, 7:00-8:30 pmWeatherhead East Asian Institute420 West 118th Street, New York, NY 10027Conference Room 918 (9th floor)In the 1910s historian Harry Harootunian's parents Ohannes and Vehanush escaped the mass slaughter of the Armenian genocide, making their way to France, where they first met, before settling in suburban Detroit. Although his parents rarely spoke of their families and the horrors they survived, the genocide and their parents' silence about it was a permanent backdrop to the Harootunian children's upbringing. In The Unspoken as Heritage Harootunian—for the first time in his distinguished career—turns to his personal life and family heritage...

Reclaiming Collective Memories in Contemporary Turkey November 20, 2019, 7:00-8:30 pm  Columbia University, Room TBA, New York, NY Join us for a panel discussion on "Reclaiming Collective Memories in Contemporary Turkey" featuring five artists, writers, and scholars. Marianne Hirsch teaches Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. Hirsch’s work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After...

Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 6:00-7:30 pm Columbia University, Knox Hall 207, 606 West 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027 A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton University Press, 2019) Once dominated by vast empires, the world is now divided into close to 200 independent countries with laws and constitutions proclaiming human rights—a transformation that suggests that nations and human rights inevitably developed together. But the reality is far more problematic, as Eric Weitz shows in this compelling global history of the fate of human rights in a world of nation-states. Eric D....

Christianity in the Middle East Today: Challenges Facing Declining Communities ~ a lecture by Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian Wednesday, October 30, 2019, at 7:00-8:30 pm  Columbia University, Room TBA,  New York, NY The Middle East is the cradle of Christianity and multi-ethnic Christian communities are amongst the most ancient natives in the region. Four of the five most important hierarchical centres in Christianity are in the Middle East today whose roots go back two millennia. While small in numbers relative to global Christianity, communities in the Middle East have ecclesial significance for the wider Christian world. This talk will discuss the many...

The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province, 1895-1930Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 7 :00 - 8:30 pm Columbia University, Knox Hall 208, 606 West 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027 This lecture explores the issues of deportation, genocide, and property seizure by concentrating particularly on the city of Aintab, focusing on the local historiography, and drawing upon Armenian and Ottoman-Turkish sources, as well as other archival materials. While Aintab’s Armenians were not unique and shared the same painful fate of other Armenian communities across Asia Minor, Aintab provides a microcosm that allows us to examine the local forces...

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance and Denial Columbia University, Knox Hall Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027 Thursday, October 17, 2019, 6:00 - 7:30 pm In this talk titled "Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance and Denial," Dr. Jermaine McCalpin will discuss the avoidance, denial, and reparations for slavery in the U.S. and the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. Dr. Jermaine McCalpin is currently Chair of the African and African- American Studies Program at New Jersey City University. He received his B.Sc. in Political Science and International Relations and M.Sc. from the University of the West Indies,...