Dr. Vartan Matiossian among winners of NAASR 2023 Dr. Sona Aronian Armenian Studies Book Prizes

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) is pleased to announce the 2023 Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prizes for Excellence in Armenian Studies, jointly awarded to Dr. Vartan Matiossian for The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and ‘Medz Yeghern’ (I. B. Tauris, 2022), Dr. Henry Shapiro for The Rise of the Western Armenian Diaspora in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and to Dr. Gohar Muradyan for the English-language translation Ancient Greek Myths in Medieval Armenian Literature (Brill, 2022), a translation of Հին յունական առասպելների արձագանգները հայ միջնադարեան մատենագրութեան մէջ (2014). The 2023 awards are for books with a 2022 publication date.

(Treasures of NAASR’s Mardigian Library) May 28: Vratsian’s Hayastani Hanrapetutʻiwn and Hovannisian’s The Republic of Armenia

May 28 marks the establishment of the Republic of Armenia in 1918, providing us with the opportunity to look back on two monuments to the short-lived but historically important republic: Hayastani Hanrapetutʻiwn (Հայաստանի Հանրապետութիւն = The Republic of Armenia), by Simon Vrats‘ean (Սիմոն Վրացեան, also Vratsian or Vratzian; we will use the spelling Vratsian in this piece), published in 1928 in Paris, and the second revised edition published in 1958 in Beirut; and Richard G. Hovannisian’s 4-volume The Republic of Armenia (1971, 1982, 1996). We will also touch upon the very direct connection between these two landmark publications and their respective authors.

NAASR’s Mardigian Library Receives Rare Guerguerian Archives

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research has received one of the most significant archives of documents relating to the Armenian Genocide—the archive collected by the late Fr. Krikor Guerguerian—for research and study in NAASR’s Mardigian Library. These materials are considered “priceless” by noted scholar Prof. Taner Akçam, who relied on them heavily for his book “Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide” (Palgrave, 2018). Akçam holds the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Among the important items in the Guerguerian archive are photographic copies of numerous official Ottoman telegrams which were used in the 1919-20 Military Tribunals but had since vanished, including one from Behaeddin Shakir, one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), inquiring about details from the field on the deportations and killings of Armenians. Akçam considers this document as a clear expression of the CUP leadership’s genocidal intentions. The archive also contains photographic images of the now lost “Memoir of Naim Bey” published by Aram Andonian around 1920.

NAASR Announces First Winners of Aronian Armenian Studies Book Prizes

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) recently announced the winners of the first Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prizes for Excellence in Armenian Studies. Aronian, who passed away on Nov. 17, 2015, established the prizes last year, to be awarded annually to an outstanding scholarly monograph in the English language in the field of Armenian studies and, in alternating years, to a translation from Armenian into English of a work of literature or of an academic book within the field of Armenian studies.

Two Book Awards for Armenian Studies

Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prizes for Excellence in Armenian Studies (NAASR)

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) recently announced the creation of the Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prizes for Excellence in Armenian Studies. The prizes will be awarded annually to an outstanding scholarly monograph in the English language in the field of Armenian studies and, in alternating years, to a translation from Armenian into English of a work of literature or of an academic book within the field of Armenian studies.

Outfront Media Pulling All Billboards for Armenian Genocide Denial Website

Chris Sweeney

Last month, The Boston Globe’s editorial board delivered a 366-word piece calling on the U.S. government to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. The article, published in print on April 24, notes that 100 years ago to the day, “Armenian intellectuals and public figures were detained and summarily executed in Constantinople—the beginning of the systematic purge of the Armenian population at the hands of the Ottoman government. By 1917, 1.5 million Armenians were murdered.”

Stealing a page from Big Tobacco and climate-change deniers: How Armenian genocide denialists get away with it

Eric Bogosian

 

It would be a mistake to think of the Ottoman leaders who engineered the mass destruction of the Armenians during World War I as nothing more than bloodthirsty barbarians. To be sure, many of their proxies were intensely violent characters common to the frontier lands of Eastern Asia Minor. But the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, the key figures in the Committee for Union and Progress, specifically Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Doctor Behaeddin Shakir and associates such as Ziya Gokalp, were urbane Europeans. They saw the world through European eyes and understood very well European law. To be sure, the eradication of the Armenian people from their homelands was a massive and terrible bloodletting, but it was not the product of a breakdown of civilization. Instead it was, like the Holocaust that would follow only 25 years later, a centrally organized, criminal act planned and prosecuted by wily and callous political leaders.

The Case Against Legitimizing Genocide Deniers: Scholars Speak Up

[The] willingness to ascribe to the deniers and their myths the legitimacy
of a point of view is of as great, if not greater,
concern than are the activities of the deniers themselves.

—Deborah Lipstadt

The participation of a number of Armenian studies and genocide studies scholars (*) in the conference “The Caucasus at the Imperial Twilight” in Tbilisi, Georgia, organized by Prof. M. Hakan Yavuz of the University of Utah and sponsored by the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) has generated a controversy in the diaspora as well as in Armenia over the enabling of genocide denial.

The individual and organization at the heart of this conference have for much of the past decade been actively engaged in efforts to extend denial of the Armenian genocide into academia as well as in the political realm in North America.

More Than Books: NAASR Brings Community Together in Quest for Armenian Studies

Aram Arkun

BELMONT, Mass. — Many people know the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), based in this suburb of Boston, as a bookstore specializing in English language works on Armenians and Armenian studies, but it actually conducts a much broader range of work in support of Armenian studies.