PanARMENIAN.Net – The USC Institute of Armenian Studies in Los Angeles will on September 23 host Innovate Armenia 2017, a day of discovery, technology, music, food, wine, chess and lively conversation headlined by a pair of celebrity-journalist brothers and two 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners, Asbarez reports.

The brothers are Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and Harvard Business Review editor Adi Ignatius.

The Pulitzer Prize winners are poet Peter Balakian, of Colgate University, and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, a USC professor of English and American studies.

“We take global Armenian questions and explore them as part of big world issues,” says director Salpi Ghazarian. “INNOVATE ARMENIA is the platform where we make the best of scholarship accessible.”

The Armenian diaspora experience has lessons for everyone, according to David Kang, a featured speaker at Innovate Armenia 2016. A professor of international relations, business and East Asian languages, Kang heads USC’s Korean Studies Institute. His presentation last year focused on the fluidity of hybrid identities. “Armenians are going through very similar issues that Koreans have,” he said in his talk.

Last year’s festival, which focused on digital humanities, drew 3,000 attendees and 20,000 more watched online. This year’s program — with a focus on rethinking, relearning and reimagining identity, language, history and technology —is expected to draw even larger crowds.