Second Feminist Armenian Studies Workshop Held at UCI

Sona Zeitlian

 

Following the successful launching of the Annual Feminist Armenian Studies Workshop in 2017 at MIT, a second two-day Workshop was organized. The workshop, titled Gendering Resistance and Revolution, took place at the University of California Irvine campus on May 4 – 5. This year’s workshop was co-organized by Houri Berberian, Professor of History and Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies at UCI, Melissa Bilal, Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia, and Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Associate Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at MIT.

‘Feminist Interventions in Armenian Studies/Armenian Interventions in Feminist Studies’ Conference Takes Place at MIT

Throughout the last couple of decades, Feminist as well as Armenian Studies have developed to become two distinct fields of inquiry. Nevertheless, few efforts have been made to see them in juxtaposition and apply the theoretical insights of the one to the other. Among such attempts was the conference “Feminist Interventions in Armenian Studies/Armenian Interventions in Feminist Studies” organized by Lerna Ekmekcioglu (MIT) and Melissa Bilal (University of Chicago) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on April 7. With the participation of senior and junior scholars, all women, the conference purported to bring together experts in various fields and generate critical and theoretical debates regarding Armenian Studies and the contributions of feminist thought to it.

Life in the aftermath: MIT historian's book explores life for Armenians in modern Turkey

  Peter Dizikes

 

In 1919, an Istanbul resident named Hayganush Mark did something remarkable: She started a magazine. Today, that might not sound extraordinary. But Mark was Armenian. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians had just been massacred as members of a religious and ethnic minority in the Ottoman Empire, and Armenians were still fleeing in the years after 1915.

Mark’s publication, Hay Gin, gave voice to an endangered group — and it kept appearing until 1933, when the Turkish government shut it down.

Moreover, Hay Gin featured feminist perspectives on work, marriage, and politics, which were not exactly common at the time. In publishing the journal, Mark was engaged in an act of political courage, while providing a guide about “how to be an Armenian in post-genocide Turkey,” as MIT historian Lerna Ekmekcioglu writes in a unique new book on the subject.

Confronting Challenges: To Be an Armenian Feminist in Turkey

Hrant Galstyan

 

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She earned her bachelor’s degree at Boğaziçi University in Turkey and master’s and PhD degrees from New York University. Lerna has authored a range of articles about ethnic and religious minorities, genocide, Armenian community in post-genocide Turkey, concentrating on the gendered perspective. In 2006, she co-edited “A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862-1933)” in Turkish, with Melissa Bilal. At the end of this year her second book, “Recovering Armenia: Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey” will be published.

In August, during her stay in Yerevan, Lerna participated in a panel organized by the AUA and presented her work on the Ottoman Turkish policies of transferring women and children from Armenian to Muslim contexts and the post-war Armenian policies in Constantinople towards retrieving the kidnapped women and their children born of rape. Hetq spoke with L. Ekmekcioglu about her work on genocides and feminism.