The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lecture Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues will present “Setting the Agenda: Genocide Studies Today and the Place of the Armenian Genocide.” The program will feature a conversation with Dr. Henry Theriault, who was recently elected president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) and is associate vice president for academic affairs at Worcester State University.
The event will take place on Sept. 21, at 7:30 p.m, at the NAASR Center (395 Concord Avenue, Belmont, Mass.).
Professor Henry C. Theriault (Photo: Armenian Genocide Centennial Committee of Toronto)
Joining Dr. Theriault in conversation will be NAASR Academic Director Marc Mamigonian. They will discuss the state of genocide studies today and the place of Armenian Genocide studies within the field.
Theriault has served as founding co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Genocide Studies International, and he chaired the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group; he was lead author of its 2015 final report. His autobiographical narrative, “Out of the Shadow of War and Genocide,” was included in Advancing Genocide Studies: Personal Accounts and Insights from Scholars in the Field (2015), edited by Samuel Totten. After 19 years on the faculty in the philosophy department at Worcester State, in 2017 he became associate vice president for academic affairs there.
A scholar who has been a leading voice among of genocide studies over the past decade and more, and now as president of IAGS, a position to which he was elected in June 2017, Theriault is among those setting the agenda for genocide studies. In his IAGS inaugural address, he stated that “genocide studies has been at the forefront of recent human rights advances…. Demagogues attack the sensibilities [that] genocide studies engenders. Our work is a crucial challenge to their propaganda. IAGS must strive against this marginalization while innovatively expanding the field, especially creating space for emerging scholars particularly vulnerable to this backlash.”