A Hub of Armenian History Makes its Mark

Lizzie Hedrick

 

Growing up in an Armenian community in Wisconsin, Richard Antaramian began wondering about his family’s history.

The answers he received didn’t adequately address his curiosity.

“It pushed me into more rigorous areas of inquiry, and ultimately I came out with a Ph.D. and a lifelong desire both to teach and research the rich history of the Armenian people,” said Antaramian, assistant professor of history and holder of the Turpanjian Early Career Chair in Contemporary Armenian Studies at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

He currently teaches two undergraduate courses on the Ottomans and World War I. In the spring he’ll teach a class on the Armenian diaspora.

Repositioning Diaspora and the Role of Its Intellectuals

Talar Chahinian

 

Over the last few decades, the term “diaspora” has rapidly spread and expanded to take on multiple meanings both inside and outside of academic disciplines. So much so, that this proliferation of meaning, configured as the dispersion of the term in a semantic and conceptual space, has been referred to as “‘diaspora’ diaspora.” (1) In response to the concept’s growing discursive popularity, the founder and editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Khachig Tölölyan, while providing the site for much of the proliferation in academia, has warned that “diaspora” is “in danger of becoming a promiscuously capacious category that is taken to include all the adjacent phenomena to which it is linked but from which it actually differs in ways that are constitutive, that in fact make a viable definition of diaspora possible.” (2)

Conference on Diaspora Discusses Critical Issues

Experts and scholars from four corners of the world were joined by hundreds of community members on Saturday April 27, 2013 at the University of Southern California’s Davidson Conference Center for a one-day academic conference called “Independence and Beyond: In Search of a New Armenian Diaspora after 1991,” which tackled critical issues facing Diaspora-homeland relations.