Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History

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
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 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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
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

Arab-Armenian Cross Cultural Encounters During the Umayyad and Early ‘Abbasid Periods
2014-03-07 15:00 - 17:00 | 10383 Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, United States
A lecture by Alison Vacca
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Michigan
Event Flyer
Event Podcast
This talk will review the extant evidence for Arab-American cross-cultural exchange in the Umayyad and early ‘Abbasid periods, focusing first on the development of ideas in Arabic texts. It will briefly address Arab knowledge of Arminiya in ‘Abbasid-era Arabic histories and geographical treatises. Arabs describes two different Arminiyas: one was the product of actual experience in the province and the other was imagined Arminiya. While the former demonstrates limited knowledge about Armenians and the lived experience of Armenians and Arabs in Arminiya, the latter is a product of the sectarian milieu in the centers of the Islamic world, outside of Arminiya itself.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies

Three Armenian Chroniclers as Primary Sources for Armenian-Iranian Cross-Cultural Encounters in Transcaucasia, 1724-1736
2014-02-21 15:00 - 16:30 | 10383 Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, United States
A lecture by Dr. George Bournoutian
Senior Professor of History
Iona College
Event flyer
Building on his recent translations of important Armenian-language primary sources for the early modern period, Dr. George Bournoutian will discuss the nature of Armenian-Iranian cross-cultural encounters in Transcaucasia during the turbulent period leading up to Nadir Shah’s assumption of the Iranian throne in 1736.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

Talk on Funding a Good Cause
2014-02-19 10:00 - 11:30 | 10383 Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, United States
Grants, Scholarships, and the Promotion of Armenian Culture in the 21st Century: The Five-Year Programming Plan of the Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
A talk by by Dr. Razmik Panossian
Event Flyer
Event Podcast
Dr. Razmik Panossian will give a presentation on the Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundations’s plan for 2014-2018. The plan is based on the Department’s mission “to create a viable future for the Armenian people in which its culture and language are preserved and valued.”

Rethinking Ottoman Cross-Cultural Encounters: Turks and the Armenian Alphabet
2013-04-26 16:00 - 18:00 | A18 Haines Hall
A lecture by Murat Cankara
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Event Flyer
Beyond the Lachrymose Conception of Armenian History: Introductory comments on Murat Cankara’s Lecture on Armeno-Turkish
Event Podcast
Murat Cankara’s talk will provide a critical overview of the history and place of Armeno-Turkish literature in both Ottoman history and historiography. Cankara will show how and why Armeno-Turkish, especially throughout the nineteenth century, was not merely an Aremenian or Turkish phenomenon but rather a cultural reflection of a larger Ottoman history. By presenting examples of Turkish statesmen, authors, and journalists who were either aware of or could read Armeno-Turkish, Cankara will explore how Armeno-Turkish might have served as a written lingua franca among the members of different ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups in the Ottoman Empire. His talk will thus contribute to the debate over the Ottoman millet system from the perspective of cross-cultural exchanges and encounters among the different peoples of the Ottoman empire.
This event was cosponsored by the UCLA Department of History and the G.E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies

Diyarbekir 1915: Deportations, Massacres, and New Alliances Among the Local Elites
2013-03-27 16:00 - 18:00 | 10383 Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, United States
A lecture by Ayhan Aktar
Bilgi University (Istanbul, Turkey)
Event flyer
Ayhan Aktar, professor of International Relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul, will speak on the tragic events that took place in Diyarbekir from 1914 to 1919. His presentation will focus on war, mobilization, the deportations of Armenians, and the flood of Muslim refugees from Eastern Anatolia, which was under Russian occupation from May 1915 to October 1917.
The event was sponsored by the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair for Modern Armenian History at UCLA and cosponsored by the UCLA Department of History and the G.E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies

Lecture on How Violence and Genocide in Ottoman Turkey Affect Our World Today
2013-03-06 16:00 - 18:00 | A18 Haines Hall
The Persistence of the Past: How Violence and Genocide in Ottoman Turkey Affect Our World Today
Event Flyer
Event Podcast
Ronald Grigor Suny, the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, will speak on the consequences, enduring legacy, and effects of the events of 1915 on politics in modern Turkey. The fate of Ottoman Armenians is intricately connected both to the identity of the Turkish nation in its denial of what occurred as the Ottoman Empire was living through its last years and to the current conflicts between Turks and Kurds. Suny will explore both the Kemalist heritage and the policies of the Islamist government of present-day Turkey.
This one-day conference was sponsored by the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair for Modern Armenian History at UCLA and cosponsored by the UCLA Department of History and the G.E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies.

One Day Conference Held on Central Asians in World History
2013-02-22 | Young Research Library Presentation Room, 280 Charles E Young Dr N, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
“The Mongols From the Margins: New Perspectives on Central Asians in World History”

A one-day conference, sponsored by the UCLA Program on Central Asia and the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History
Friday, February 22, 2013
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
UCLA Young Research Library
Presentation Room (11348 LLC-ground floor)
Stretching from the plains of Eastern Europe to the warm waters of the Pacific, the Pax Mongolica created Eurasia-wide networks of exchange and circulation through which not only military personnel, pathogens, and commodities circulated from China to the Eastern Mediterranean, but also ideas, customs, and social practices. How did the tenticular expansion of Mongol networks transform the cultural, social, and even imaginary realms of societies situated on the peripheries of Mongol rule? How did the societies on the margins in turn project their own representations of Mongol rule and its transformative role in the history of the region? This conference seeks to explore these two different yet related questions from the perspective of peoples on the distant margins of the Pax Mongolica who usually do not occupy a central position in the conventional historiography of Mongol Eurasia. Placing a Central Asian empire and its Eurasian outliers into the framework of a global medieval history, The Mongols from the Margins brings together international specialists on Cilician Armenia, the Caucasus, Japan, Europe, Egypt, and Byzantium to re-examine Mongol history from its multifarious peripheries.
Organized by Nile Green, Director of the Program on Central Asia and Professor of History, and Sebouh Aslanian, Assistant Professor & Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History.
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Schedule:
10:00 – Welcome
10:15 – Opening Remarks
Nile Green, Professor & Director of the Program on Central Asia
Sebouh Aslanian, Assistant Professor & Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History
10:30 – Panel 1: Western Margins? (Chair: Peter Cowe, UCLA)
Charles Halperin, Russian and East European Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington
No One Knew Who They Were: Russian Interaction with the Mongols
Steve Rapp, Sam Houston State University
Mongol Caucasia: Regional Historiographies and Social Change in an Integrating Eurasian World
Zara Pogossian, Bochum University/John Cabot College (Rome)
The changing role of women in Cilician Armenian court as a result of interacting with the Mongols
12:30 – Lunch
2:00 – Panel 2: Eastern Margins? (Chair: Richard von Glahn, UCLA)
Thomas Conlan, Bowdoin College
From Ad Hoc to Ongoing: The Mongol Invasions and the Institutionalization of Authority in Japan
Bettine Birge, USC
Reception and (Mis)representation: Mongol Influences on China from the Perspective of Law and Gender
3:30 – Coffee break
4:00 – Keynote Lecture- Introduced by Bin Wong, UCLA
Morris Rossabi, Distinguished Professor of History, Queens College, CUNY
The Mongol Contribution to Eurasian History
5:00 – End of conference
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How to Park at UCLA
Tel: (310) 825-0007
asia@international.ucla.edu
international.ucla.edu/asia/centralasia/
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Asia Institute, Program on Central Asia, Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History

UCLA to Host Important Conference to mark 500 years of Armenian Printing
2012-11-09 - 2012-11-11 | UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
LOS ANGELES—From Nov. 9-11, the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA will host an international conference titled “Port Cities and Printers: Five Centuries of Global Armenian Print” in honor of Prof. Richard Hovannisian.
From its origins in Venice in 1512, the history of early modern (1500-1800) Armenian print culture was closely entangled with that of port cities, initially in Europe and subsequently in Asia. In fact, virtually every Armenian printing press before 1800 was established either in or close to port cities, and the few that were not, owed their existence to ongoing relations with port locations. Yet, despite the obvious relationship between ports and printers, their synergetic relationship has thus far largely eluded scholarly attention. Convened on the quincentenary of the printing of the first Armenian book, this conference explores the intimate relationship between port cities and printers in the rich history of global Armenian print culture.
The conference will be convened by Dr. Sebouh D. Aslanian, the holder of the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair of Modern Armenian History at UCLA, and is co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History, the UCLA G. E. Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), and is made possible by a generous grant by Mr. Mark Chenian. The conference will kick off with a keynote address on the topic of the history of books and reading in the early modern Atlantic world, not directly related to Armenian print history, at Royce Hall 314 on Friday evening at 5 PM. Starting on Saturday morning at 9:15 AM, scholars of Armenian print and book history will hold back-to-back panels on various aspects of Armenian book history ranging from the topic of the crucial shift from Manuscript to Print culture in the early decades of the 1500s to the relationship between merchants, ports, and printers, as well as the social and cultural role of print technology in shaping the arc of Armenian history. The Saturday and Sunday panels will be held at Rolfe Hall 1200 on the UCLA campus from 9:15 AM to 6:00 PM. The conference is free and open to the public. Download the conference program by clicking the following:
Port Cities and Printers Conference Program
Click here to view speaker essays for November 10
Click here to view speaker essays for November 11
For further information contact Dr. Sebouh Aslanian at saslanian@history.ucla.edu.

Additional news on this conference can be found on the The Armenian Weekly website.
