Live on Zoom. Registration is required and free.
Livestream on the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute YouTube channel.
PRESENTER
DR. JELLE VERHEIJ, Historian
DISCUSSANT
DR. OWEN MILLER, Historian
Over the course of three years in the mid-1890s (1894-1897), tens of thousands of Ottoman Armenians were killed in pogroms known as the Hamidian massacres—after Sultan Abdülhamid II (reigned 1876-1909). Despite being known contemporarily as "the great massacres" among Armenians and the importance of this period for Ottoman-Kurdish-Armenian relations, the massacres received very little scholarly attention, even by specialists in Armenian history, until the late 1990s. Only in the last two decades have research articles appeared, primarily case studies of individual massacres.
Dr. Jelle Verheij (University of Amsterdam) is the author of several works on the Hamidian massacres, and his research articles of the late 1990s were among the first on the subject. His Ph.D. thesis is a voluminous 800-page study that may pass for the first comprehensive monograph on the massacres. He specializes in the history of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, Armenian-Ottoman-Kurdish relations and historical geography. Since the 1990s, Verheij has worked on the Hamidian massacres of 1894-97 and is the author of several articles on the subject (1998, 1999, 2012) and a Ph.D. thesis, The Armenian Massacres of the Hamidian period, 1894-97. An Empirical Inquiry, Amsterdam University, 2022.
Dr. Owen Miller, the author of a thesis and several research articles on the Sasun massacre of 1894 and its background, will discuss with Jelle Verheij his findings and the need for revision of the traditional perspectives, touching on many of the key issues and players: the death toll, characteristics and motivation of the perpetrators, the roles of the Ottoman authorities, foreign powers and Armenian revolutionary parties.
ORGANIZER
Armenian Genocide Research Program at the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute
CO-SPONSORS
Ararat-Eskijian Museum (AEM)
National Association for Armenian Studies and Reserach (NAASR)
UCLA Promise Armenian Institute (PAI)
UCLA Richard Hovannisian Chair in Modern Armenian History
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