Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History

William Saroyan: The Unpublished Plays in Performance
2018-10-28 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Jan Popper Theater, Schoenberg Hall, 445 Charles E. Young Drive East, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
A world premier Vista Players production created and directed by Aram Kouyoumdjian and performed by Jade Hykush, Will Maizel, Bailey Sorrel, and Robert Walters.
Event Flyer

Voice Signatures: Recordings of Russian Armenian POWs in German Camps, 1916-1918
2018-05-10 18:00 - 19:30 | 1234 Public Policy, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
A Lecture by Melissa Bilal
University of Chicago
Event Flyer

Photography in the Ottoman Middle East & Beyond
2018-03-25 10:30 - 16:00 | Brand Library, 1601 West Mountain Street, Glendale, CA, 91201, United States
A Symposium Moderated by Dr. Armen T. Marsoobian
Co-Curator of Continuity and Rupture: An Armenian Family Odyssey

Event Videos

Sultan Abdulhamid II: Founding Father of the Turkish State?
2018-03-23 14:00 - 17:00 | 10383 Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, United States
A Lecture by Edhem Eldem
College de France
Event Podcast

Marriage Law and Marriage Culture among Western Armenians, 1860-1908
2018-03-08 18:30 - 20:00 | CA
A Lecture by Dr. Hasmik Khalapyan

UCLA Haines Hall, Room A18
Thursday, March 8, 2018, 6:30-8:00 PM
Event Flyer
This event is Co-Sponsored by The Richard Hovannisian Chair in Modern Armenian History, and the UCLA Gustave von Grunebaum Center for Near East Studies

Confessionalization and Reform: The Mkhit‘arist Enterprise from Constantinople to Venice, Trieste, and Vienna
2017-12-16 - 2017-12-17 | UCLA Faculty Center, California Room, 480 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
A Conference in memory of Father Sahak Djemjemian and on the Occasion of the 300th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Congregation in Venice
Event Flyer and Program Details
Event Videos

Interculturalism and the Integration of Syrian-Armenian Refugees to Montreal, Quebec
2017-10-26 18:30 - 20:00 | CA
A Lecture by Gabriella Djerrahian
Concordia University, Montreal

UCLA School of Law, Room 1314
Thursday, October 26, 2017, 6:30-8:00 PM
Event Flyer
This event is Co-Sponsored by The Richard Hovannisian Chair in Modern Armenian History, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, and the UCLA School of Law Promise Institute for Human Rights.

The King and the Forty Orphans: The Invention of an Armenian Homeland in Ethiopia
2017-10-12 18:30 - 20:00 | UCLA School of Law, 385 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
A Lecture by Boris Adjemian
Historian and Director of AGBU Nubar Library (Paris)

UCLA School of Law, Room 1420
Thursday, October 12, 2017, 6:30-8:00 PM
Event Flyer
This event is Co-Sponsored by The Richard Hovannisian Chair in Modern Armenian History, the UCLA African Studies Center, and the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Dissent in an Age of Populism: Sustaining Political Opposition after Turkey's 2017 Referendum
2017-10-09 17:30 - 19:00 | UCLA School of Law, 385 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Garo Paylan
MP, Peoples’ Democratic Party, Member of the Parliamentary Committees on Constitution and Budget

UCLA School of Law, Room 1314
Monday, October 9, 2017, 5:30-7:00 PM
Event Flyer
This event is Co-Sponsored by the UCLA School of Law’s The Promise Institute for Human Rights, The Richard Hovannisian Chair in Modern Armenian History, and the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Abbot Mkhit‘ar of Sebastea: A Sacred Genius and an Enduring Challenge for Today
2017-09-24 13:30 - 15:00 | Royce Hall, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
A lecture by His Eminence, Archbishop Levon Zekiyan
Royce Hall 314, UCLA
Sunday, September 24, 2017, 1:30-3:00 PM
Event flyer in Armenian
Event flyer in English
A light lunch and refreshments will be served before the lecture. Talk will be given in Armenian and English.
This event is presented by The Richard Hovannisian Chair in Modern Armenian History with the co-sponsorship of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).

Contemporary Challenges in Human Rights
2017-04-17 | UCLA School of Law, 385 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
A Talk with Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C.

The City as Anthology: Visualizing Cultures of Literacy in Early Modern Isfahan
2017-04-06 14:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, United States
A lecture by Kathryn Babyan
Associate Professor of Iranian History & Culture, Director Armenian Studies Program
University of Michigan
Event Flyer
The City as Anthology will encapsulate the story of Isfahan through private collections assembled in the domestic sphere of urban households. Thousands of anthologies were produced in seventeenth century family libraries, shaping tastes and aesthetics as they participated in the making of a graphic culture. Paintings and drawings were commissioned and purchased; private letters, verses of poetry, and talismans, along with all sorts of fragments were arranged and recorded on paper. This talk will serve as a guide to my reading of these anthologies as an account of households and communities of literacy before print.
Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

The Age of the Gharib: Strangers and Estrangement in the Pre-modern Mediterranean
2017-03-02 18:00 - 19:30 | 220 Haines Hall
A lecture by Michael Pifer
National Endorsement for the Humanities Fellow
University of Michigan

The trope of the wandering stranger, the outcast with secret prestige, can be found in pre-modern literatures around the world. This lecture will shed light on an intersecting discourse about strangers across Jewish, Muslim, and Christian societies, with the intention of illuminating the peregrinations of the restless outcast known as the gharib in Middle Armenian poetry in particular. As it will argue, the mobile figure of the gharib, which performatively travels across multiple cultural systems, suggests an alternative manner of parsing what is ‘native’ and ‘foreign,’ indigenous and exogenous, in the societies through which it moves.
Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

Homeland(s), Belonging, and Contested Loyalties Among Early Armenian Immigrants in America
2017-02-16 18:00 - 19:30 | Franz Hall 1260
A Talk by Vahe Sahakyan

Moving away from elites- and institutions-centered approaches to the Armenian diaspora, this lecture will address the changing perceptions of belonging and homeland among early Armenian immigrants in America by examining the programs, projects, and activities of their hometown societies in the period between the 1890s and 1930s.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History

Armenia’s Current Political and Social Situation in Global Context
2016-11-03 18:00 - 19:30 | 118 Haines Hall
A Talk by Dr. Armine Ishkanian
Event Flyer
Dr. Armine Ishkanian is an Assistant Professor (tenured) and Programme Director of the MSc in Social Policy and Development in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. She has expertise in civil society, democratization, gender, social policy and development in the post-socialist countries of the former Soviet Union and Europe. She will speak about the current situation in Armenia and how it has been shaped by, and is a consequence of, the politics and policies of the past twenty-five years of independence.
Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

Survivors into Minorities: Armenians in Post Genocide Turkey
2016-04-19 14:00 - 15:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, United States
A Book Talk by Dr. Lerna Ekmekcioglu
McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Ekmekcioglu’s talk follows the trajectories of the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who remained inside Turkish borders after the signing of the 1918 Mudros Armistice (and during the Allied occupation years of Istanbul) and after the 1923 establishment of the new country as the Turkish Republic. How did the Kemalist state treat the remaining Armenians? What were the Armenians’ responses to the new (but also old) Turkish regime? The talk discusses multiple strategies that Armenians—including feminist Armenians—crafted in order to cohabit with unapologetic perpetrators and survive the new Turkey.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies

Can the Survivor Speak?
2016-04-14 18:00 - 19:30 | 118 Haines Hall
Dr. Talin Suciyan
Ludwig Maximilian University
Event Flyer
Dr. Talin Suciyan’s talk will present the central findings of her recent publication, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post–Genocide Society, Politics and History (I.B. Tauris, 2016). The lecture will discuss the author’s reconstruction of the little–known history of the remarkable survival of Turkey’s Armenian community in the wake of the genocide of 1915 by relying on a painstaking examination of local Armenian sources alongside documentation from the Turkish state archives. By using oral histories, minutes of the Armenian National Assembly,memoirs, personal archives, yearbooks, and various newspapers published during the post–1923 period, Suciyan tries to restore a historiographic voice to those silenced by history.
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Co–sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies

Total Destruction by Despoliation
2015-05-15 18:00 - 19:30 | Haines A25
The Role of Local and Provincial Elites in the Annihilation and Deportation of Aintab Armenians, 1915-1918: A talk by Umit Kurt
Clark University
Event Flyer
Umit Kurt’s talk explores the role of local notables and provincial elites in the process of genocide and deportation directed at Aintab Armenians. It argues that as a result of their participation in the genocide, these local actors prospered and were able to transform themselves into the new wealthy social stratum through the acquisition of Armenians’ property and wealth.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

Groundbreaking Academic Conference on Armenian Genocide
2015-04-26 | Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey
Scholars from around the world will convene at Istanbul Bilgi University on April 26, 2015, to participate in an international conference entitled “The Armenian Genocide: Concepts and Comparative Perspectives”.
Event Press Release | Event Program

This event is co-sponsored by Istanbul Bilgi University, the History Foundation in Turkey (Tarih Vakfı), and the Modern Armenian History Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Armenian Genocide Centennial Commemoration
2015-04-24 | Istanbul, Turkey
April 24, 2015 will mark the 100-year anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, a concerted campaign by Ottoman leaders that resulted in the deaths and exile of the vast majority of their Armenian citizens, which remains unrecognized by any Turkish government.
To mark this tragic milestone, Project 2015, a US-based non-profit group, working with DurDe, a leading Turkish human rights organization, along with other civil society groups and activists in Turkey, is organizing a series of commemorative events in Istanbul between April 22 – 24, 2015.
Project 2015 is a US-based non-profit group whose board is comprised of leading scholars, academics, activists, and writers of Armenian and Turkish descent in the United States. The Board is helping to organize the program for the commemoration events in Istanbul, working closely with Turkish civil society organizations.

UCLA to Host Important Conference to Mark 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide
2015-04-10 - 2015-04-11 | CA
LOS ANGELES—From April 10-11, 2015. The Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA [established by the Armenian Educational Foundation] will hold a conference to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. The event is co-sponsored by the Gustave Von Grunebaum Center for Near East Studies (UCLA), the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies,as well as the UCLA Department of History. It will involve two days of panels featuring an international cast of world-renowned scholars as well as an evening of keynote speakers on Friday (April 10) and a small concert at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall. Professors Richard G. Hovannisian, Ronald Grigor Suny, and Istanbul-based public intellectual and academic Murat Belge will each provide their reflections with musical interludes by the Armenian Music Ensemble of UCLA under the direction of Movses Poghossian. One of the concerns that threads together the different academic panels on the genocide is to embed the Armenian-Ottoman tragedy within the larger contexts of world or global history, emphasizing the comparative and connective aspects of this defining event in the historical trajectories of Armenians, Turks, and others in the course of a “century of genocides.” Participating scholars include Norman Naimark, Donald Bloxham, Jay Winter, Dirk Moses, Richard Hovannisian, Gary Bass, Gerard Libaridian, Donald Miller, Bülent Bilmez, Bedross Der Matossian, Uğur Ümit Üngör, Janet Klein, Ruken Şengul, Murat Yildiz, Sossie Kasbarian, Dzovinar Derderian, and others. Please see the conference poster for a full listing of the program and venue.

Direct any inquiries to conference organizer and holder of the Chair, Professor Sebouh D. Aslanian,ucla.armenianhistory.chair@gmail.com.

Between Historical Explanation and Narrative Understanding: The Story of Menk and the Burden of Representation
2015-04-01 18:00 - 19:30 | Haines A25
A lecture by Dr. Talar Chahinian
California State University, Long Beach
Event Flyer
Dr. Chahinian’s presentation will overview the work of a group of orphans, who, in 1931, launched a short-lived, diasporan literary movement called Menk in Paris. The works of these French-Armenian writers, though devoid of explicit memory of the catastrophic events of the past, characterize the crisis of survival in the aftermath of the genocide, both for the survivor living in exile and the displaced culture’s prospects of reproduction.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Gustave E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies

Ottoman (Dis)Placements, Geographies and Spatialities in the World of a Seventeenth-Century Armenian Author in Kefe (Feodosia)
2015-03-11 18:00 - 19:30 | 118 Haines Hall
A lecture by Professor Rachel Goshgarian
Lafayette College

This paper strives to reconsider seventeenth-century Armenian conceptions of space in the Ottoman Empire, specifically through the lens of a unique manuscript composed by an Armenian priest (Mikayel) in the city of Kefe on the Black Sea.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History and the Gustave E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies

Armenian Genocide Studies: A Historiographic Appraisal and the Road Ahead
2015-03-05 18:00 - 19:30 | Haines A25
A lecture by Professor Stephan Astourian
William Saroyan Director of the Armenian Studies Program
University of California, Berkeley
Event Flyer
Professor Stephan Astourian’s talk will provide a survey of the field of Armenian Genocide studies, outline its academic development, especially over the past thirty years, and lay bare the “conditions” of its production. The lecture will assess the state of the current historiography, point to some of the gaps in the existing literature, and discuss the status of its main archival sources. It will conclude by exploring the road that lies ahead.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History and the Gustave E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies

All The Light There Was – A Novel About Armenians in Nazi-Occupied Paris
2015-02-25 18:00 - 19:30 | Haines A25
A lecture by Nancy Kricorian
Acclaimed Novelist
February 25, 2015
Event Flyer
While doing research on the uses of political violence by “non-state actors” for her second novel Dreams of Bread and Fire, Nancy Kricorian came across a 1984 French documentary entitled “Terrorists in Retirement” (original title “Des terroristes à la retraite“). It told the story of a French Communist Resistance network made up of immigrant workers. The network’s leader was an Armenian poet named Missak Manouchian. In late 1943, the Germans arrested Manouchian and 22 members of his group, which was comprised of Eastern European Jews, Armenians, and Italian and Spanish refugees. Kricorian began to imagine what it would have been like for Armenian Genocide survivors, such as Manouchian, to live out the war years in Paris. This question became the basis for her third novel, All the Light There Was, which tells the story of Maral Pegorian, a young Armenian girl who is the narrator and protagonist of the book.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Gustave von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies

Intimacy, Testimony, Protest: Armenian Lullaby as a Genre of History
2015-02-13 18:00 - 19:30 | Haines A25
A lecture by Dr. Melissa Bilal
Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow
Columbia University
Event Flyer
The history accumulated on the Armenian lullaby represents a resource for remembrance, story telling, and the transmission of a sense of loss. Melissa Bilal’s presentation critically analyzes the historical formation of the genre of lullaby in Armenian ethnographic and revolutionary literature and contextualizes it within turn-of-the-twentieth-century gendered politics of land and modernity. Tracing specific examples of songs in printed archival material, sound recordings, and interviews, Bilal points to the continuities and ruptures in the transmission of this repertory within the present day Armenian community of Istanbul. She argues that the Armenian lullaby today takes its political capacity from conveying the affective knowledge to survive the epistemology of denial.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Gustave von Grunebaum Center for Near East Studies

Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire
2015-01-16 17:30 - 19:00 | CA
A lecture by Bedross Der Mattosian
Department of History
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Event Flyer
Podcast of Event
Summarizing the main findings of his recently published book, Bedross Der Matossian will explore comparative perspectives on how the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and its constitutionalist ideological underpinnings raised the expectations and hopes of ethnic groups within the Ottoman Empire. The lecture will analyze the ways in which the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian, Arab, and Jewish communities internalized the Revolution amid the post-revolutionary turmoil by negotiating their space and identity within the rapidly changing political landscape of the period. By creating their own micro-revolutions, ancien régime(s), and new era, these groups heralded the Revolution and constitutionalism as the ultimate panacea for the existing maladies inflicting not only their communities but also the Ottoman Empire in general.
This events was co-sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Violence against Armenians, 1789-2009
2014-11-05 18:00 - 20:00 | 2209A Bunche Hall
A lecture by Fatma Muge Gocek
Professor of Sociology
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Event Flyer
Event Podcast
While much of the international community regards the forced deportation of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide, the Turkish state continues to officially deny it, insisting instead that what occurred took place during war and that the losses on their side were just as great. In this talk based on her recently published book, Professor Fatma Muge Gocek will delve into the roots of this denial and explain why it still persists. Professor Gocek will specifically focus on the denial of collective violence committed against Armenians throughout Ottoman and Turkish history, demonstrating its occurrence many times before 1915. To capture the negotiation of meaning that leads to denial, she qualitatively analyzes 315 memoirs published in Turkey from 1789 to 2009 in addition to numerous secondary sources, journals, and newspapers. Her analysis reveals that denial is a multi-layered, historical process with four distinct yet overlapping components: the structural elements of collective violence and modernity on one side, and the emotional elements of collective consensus and legitimating events on the other. In the Turkish case, denial emerged through four stages, beginning with the imperial denial of the origins of collective violence committed against Armenians that commenced in 1789 and continued until 1907, followed by the Young Turk denial of violence lasting for a decade from 1908 to 1918, then an early republican denial taking place from 1919 to 1973, and culminating with the late republican denial of the responsibility for the collective violence started in 1974, which continues to this day.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies

Networks of Circulation and Exchange
2014-10-15 - 2014-10-17 | UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
This conference explored the symbiotic and often unexamined relationship between paper instruments, commodities, and long-distance trading networks through the experience of Armenian, Portuguese, Jewish, and Muslim communities across the worlds of East and West.
Event Flyer
Event Program
Co-Sponsored by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), The Richard Hovannisian Chair of Modern Armenian History, and Universidade Nova de Lisboa Department of History

Medieval Heresy Between Armenia and Khurasan
2014-03-14 14:00 - 16:00 | 10383 Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, United States
A lecture by Mushegh Asatryan
Event Flyer
Event Podcast
Mushegh Asatryan’s lecture will explore the history of the emergence of the Tondrakians in the larger context of the history of heretical movements in the Middle East during the eighth and ninth centuries. While the several similarities in religious teachings do not necessarily indicate a direct borrowing, the lecture will argue that the spatial and chronological proximity of the Tondrakians to similar heresies in the Islamicate world of Iraq and Iran — coupled with Armenia’s historic links with the region where these heresies emerged — is more than suggestive that two developments were indeed part of a larger “connected history.” The lecture will examine the connected nature of this history by highlighting the circulation of men and religious ideas across the porous frontiers linking Iraq and Khurasan to Armenia during the period of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphates when Armenia was first incorporated into the larger Islamic world and even earlier when the entire region was under Sasanian rule.
This event was co-sponsored by The Center for Near Eastern Studies
