(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 9, 2023

“Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide“

Elyse Semerdjian, PhD

Tuesday, April 25 / 8:00 – 9:00 / Zoom only

Register Here

In commemoration of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and in partnership with the Armenian National Committee of New Jersey

Join us for discussion with Dr. Elyse Semerdjian. She will be discussing her forthcoming book, Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide.

Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants, these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and—in what remains of those lives a century afterward—bones.

Elyse Semerdjian is currently the Chair of the Department of History and Professor of Islamic World/Middle Eastern History at Whitman College. She teaches a broad range of courses on the subject of gender, sexuality, social history, culture, and politics of the Middle East and won the G. Thomas Edwards Award for excellence in Teaching and Scholarship at Whitman College in 2016. A specialist in the history of the Ottoman Empire and Syria, she authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023) as well as several articles on gender, Ottoman Armenians, and law in the Ottoman Empire.

In the Spring of 2013, Dr. Semerdjian was selected as the Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies in The Department of Near Eastern Cultures and Languages at the University of Chicago. Beginning in August 2023, she will begin serving as the incoming Kaloosdian/Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University.

In 2016, Dr. Semerdjian was awarded a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship on the subject of “Skin” to support the writing of Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023). In 2022, she received a German Research Grant with the “Religion and Urbanity” Research Group at University of Erfurt, Germany, to support work on her next book project on the Armenians of Aleppo.

E-News Archives