Dr. Hrag Papazian, Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies, will present an in-person lecture entitled “The Christian Armenian Community.” The lecture will be held on Friday, September 9 at 7:00 p.m., in the Smittcamp Alumni House, Whitten Boardroom, on the Fresno State campus. The presentation is the first in Dr. Papazian’s three-part series on “Armenians and ‘Other Armenians’ in Contemporary Turkey.”
This first lecture will discuss the legal-institutional and political contexts in which Christian Armenian citizens of Turkey had to survive and organize their communal life since the founding of the Republic. Dr. Papazian will examine the impact of these on the ways Armenian identity has been experienced and, importantly, on how it is conventionally understood and defined in the community. The talk will also explore some of the more recent developments among Turkey’s Armenians facilitated by contextual changes at the turn of the 21st century.
Dr. Hrag Papazian is the Kazan Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at Fresno State. He earned his doctoral degree in anthropology from the University of Oxford (2020) where his dissertation about Armenians in contemporary Turkey was awarded the David Parkin Prize. His thesis also received an honorary mention in the Society for Armenian Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award competition (2017-2020). Before coming to Fresno, Papazian was Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and an Adjunct Lecturer at the American University of Armenia.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The Smittcamp Alumni House is located at 2625 E. Matoian Way on the Fresno State campus. Free parking is available in Fresno State Lots P1 and P2 (parking permits are not required on Friday evenings). Enter the campus at Shaw and Maple Aves. and turn right onto Matoian Way (first stop sign). The Smittcamp Alumni House is the second building on the left.
For information about upcoming Armenian Studies Program presentations, please follow us on our Facebook page, @ArmenianStudiesFresnoState or at the Program website.