PRESS RELEASE
The Armenian Center at Columbia University
P. O. Box 4042
Grand Central Station
New York, NY 10163-4042
Email: c/o [email protected]
Black Dog of Fate Expanded Edition Twelve Years After: Discussion with
Professors Winter (Yale), Kalaidjian (Emory), and Dabashi (Columbia)
and Reading by Author Balakian, March 27 Columbia University
Three noted professors from Yale, Emory, and Columbia Universities
will address various themes from Peter Balakian’s bestselling memoir
Black Dog of Fate, and author Balakian himself will present a reading
from the new tenth anniversary edition of the book at a Columbia
Armenian Center event on Friday evening, March 27 in New York City.
Jay Winter from Yale and Walter Kalaidjian of Emory are the two main
speakers, and Hamid Dabashi of Columbia will be serving as master of
ceremonies.
Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate has been in continuous print since
its publication, having gone through 24 printings. It received great
publicity in American media, including reviews in many major
newspapers like the New York Times, and discussions on television
programs like Charlie Rose. University courses in various parts of
the United States use this work, sometimes as a required text. It has
helped spread public knowledge and discussion of the Armenian Genocide
in this country and abroad in a way that more formal academic
monographs cannot. Written with the style and insight of a poet, it
remains personal and accessible while dealing with issues of violence,
genocide, and nationalism that continue to haunt the world to this
day. Balakian’s work no doubt has been one of a number of factors
leading to a greater awareness and understanding of the events of the
Armenian Genocide in the West in the last decade or so. Important
public figures like Samantha Powers have relied on Balakian’s work as
a source for their own writing.
Black Dog of Fate has just come out in an enlarged edition, twelve
years after its original publication, which includes two new chapters
about Aleppo and Der Zor, so this is an appropriate time to step back
and examine this important contemporary work and its continuing
influence. The participants in the program at Columbia are well
prepared for this task.
Jay M. Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale
University. A specialist on World War I and its impact on the
twentieth century, Winter is the author or co-author of one dozen
books, and the editor of many more, including America and the Armenian
Genocide of 1915. Jay Winter was co-producer, co-writer and chief
historian for the <;PBS series "The
Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century," which won an
<; Emmy Award, a
< t;Peabody Award and a
< _of_America_Award>Producers
Guild of America Award for best television documentary in 1997. Winter
obtained his B.A. from Columbia and his graduate degrees from
Cambridge University.
Walter Kalaidjian is Professor of English at Emory University. He has
authored four books on twentieth-century American literature, and is
the editor of the Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. His
research and teaching focus on transnational modern and contemporary
literature and culture specializing in poetics, critical theory, and
psychoanalysis. He has examined poetry on the Armenian Genocide,
including Peter Balakian’s works, in The Edge of Modernism: American
Poetry and the Traumatic Past. A recipient of grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned
Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Professor Kalaidjian
in his forthcoming research explores textual linkages among
globalization, terrorism, and extraordinary experience. He earned his
B.A. from Kenyon College, and his doctorate from the University of
Illinois.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest
and most prestigious Chair in Iranian Studies in the United States.
Professor Dabashi has written 18 books, and edited 4. His writings
are on subjects including Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam,
comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art
(trans-aesthetics). Born in Ahvaz, Iran, he went to college in Tehran
and received a dual Ph.D. in the Sociology of Culture and Islamic
Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. His books and articles
have been translated into Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian,
Russian, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish,
Turkish, Urdu and Catalan. A committed teacher for nearly three
decades, Professor Dabashi is also a public speaker around the globe,
a current affairs essayist, and a staunch anti-war activist.
Peter Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of
the Humanities at Colgate University, and author of several books of
poetry and literary criticism, as well as New York Times bestseller,
The Burning Tigris, which won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize. Soon his
co-translation of Archbishop Krikoris Balakian’s seminal memoir,
Armenian Golgotha, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The evening program will begin at 6 p.m. with a reception with mezze
at Columbia University’s International Affairs Building Room 1501
(Kellogg Center), at 420 W. 118 St. Admission is complimentary. For
more information, please send your emails to
<mailto:[email protected]>arkuna@earth link.net.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
