Vahe and Armine Meghrouni Lecture Series talk by Dr. Helen Makhdoumian (Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA)
“Worlding Armenian Cultural Memory Studies: What Our Diasporic Condition Tells Us”
Wednesday, February 8, 2023, at 6:00PM
Humanities Gateway 1010
In Armenian Studies, much of what can be categorized under cultural memory studies as a mode of inquiry has focused on the Armenian Genocide. At the same time, a closer look at lived kinship-making processes reveals that points of relation are established when diasporic community members share with one another their experiences of living through succeeding events of collective violence and displacement, such as the Lebanese Civil War or the Syrian Civil War. While not a historical or sociological presentation, this talk nevertheless makes the case for critical study of memory work in diasporic settings and offers inroads to take up such projects by turning to Anglophone Armenian and Arab literary and artistic production.
Speaker Bio:
Helen Makhdoumian is a 2022-2023 Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, she was a Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she also completed a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies as well as certificates through the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her public writing has appeared in venues such as Days and Memory, Kritik, and Grad Life (blogs at Illinois), and her articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. She is currently developing her dissertation, which won the Charles Bernheimer prize for best dissertation from the American Comparative Literature Association, into a book manuscript titled “A Map of This Place: Nested Memory and the Afterlives of Removal.”