MIT Scholar on Armenians in Post-Genocide Turkey and Turkish Denial

The ASU and High Country communities are invited to a talk by Dr. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, the McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist in modern Turkish and Armenian history. The lecture on the past and present denial of the Armenian Genocide and struggles of Armenian survivors in post-genocide Turkey will begin at 7:00 pm on Monday, April 15. It is entitled "What Can Genocide and its Denial Do to Feminism? The Existential Paradoxes of Armenians in Post-Genocide Turkey" and will take place at the Blue Ridge Ballroom 201, Plemmons Student Union, on the ASU campus. It is free of charge. No tickets are required.

Prof. Ekmekçioğlu is a historian of the modern Middle East and an affiliate of the Women and Gender Studies Program as well as the Center for International Studies at MIT.  She specializes on Turkish and Armenian lands in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Her work focuses on minority-majority relationships and the ways in which gendered analytical lenses help us better understand coexistence and conflict, including genocide and post-genocide. 

Prof. Ekmekçioğlu is the author of Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2016), which offers the first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey. She also co-edited of Bir Adalet Feryadı, Osmanlı'dan Cumhuriyet'e Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar (1862-1933) [A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862-1933)], which appeared in 2006. Currently, Prof. Ekmekcioglu is collaborating with Dr. Melissa Bilal in compiling a critical anthology of the history of Western Armenian feminism. In addition, she is working with Dr. Kent Schull (Binghamton, SUNY) on an edited volume on the entangled histories of Armenians in the 19^th century Ottoman Empire.

Her work is also the focus of the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies (CJHPS)'s final lunch research colloquium. It will take place at the new conference of the Center in Edwin Duncan Hall on Monday, April 15. RSVP required. 

To RSVP for the symposium and more information on her visit, please contact the CJHPS at 828.262.2311 or holocaust@appstate.edu.

With the events, the CJHPS begins to mark this year's Genocide Awareness Month, which will be continued with the Holocaust Cantata on April 30. Organized by the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, the visit is co-sponsored by the ASU Departments of Culture, Gender and Global Studies, English, and History, the local chapters of Hillel and AEPi, the Peace and Genocide Education Club, the Temple of the High Country, and UNCC's Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies.