Dr. Melissa Bilal<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tuesday, April 30th, 2019 at 7:00pm
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
600 South Gregory, Urbana, IL<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Professor Bilal will first provide an overall introduction to Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive<\/em>, a collaborative project with Lerna Ekmek\u00e7io\u011flu (MIT) that aims to end the ever-present invisibility of activist women in Armenian historiography and collective memory. She will then focus on one of the authors featured in this project, namely Yelbis Gesaratsian (1830 – ?) editor of the first Armenian women\u2019s journal in the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on Gesaratsian’s writings, Professor Bilal will discuss the interrelatedness of discourses on gender, sexuality, body, emotion, culture, history, nation, modernity, land, and music in the nineteenth-century Armenian intellectual narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hosted by:<\/em> Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies<\/p>\n\n\n\n In conjunction with:<\/em> April 24 Fund, Center for Global Studies, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Department of History, Department of Political Science, Department of Sociology, European Union Center, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Program in Women and Gender in Global Perspectives, School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Spurlock Museum<\/p>\n\n\n\n Melissa Bilal<\/p>\n\n\n\n Melissa Bilal is Visiting Assistant Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia. She has a PhD in Ethnomusicology (University of Chicago) and BA and MA in Sociology (Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University, Istanbul). Previously, she has taught several Music, Memory Studies, Gender Studies, Armenian Studies, and Ottoman Studies courses at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University. She was recently Visiting Scholar of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she worked on Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive<\/em>, a book and digital humanities project (with Lerna Ekmek\u00e7io\u011flu) on twelve Ottoman-born Armenian feminist activist writers. Together with Professor Ekmek\u00e7io\u011flu, she is also the convener of the annual Feminist Armenian Studies <\/em>workshops and the founding member of Feminist Armenian Research Collective<\/em>. Her most recent publications include the article \u201cLullabies and the Memory of Pain: Armenian Women\u2019s Remembrance of the Past in Turkey\u201d (Dialectical Anthropology<\/em>, August 2018) and the CD project Voice Signatures: Recordings of Russian Armenian POWs in German Camps, 1916-1918 <\/em>(Staatliche Museen zu Berlin \u2013 Preu\u00dfischer Kulturbesitz, Forthcoming 2019).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n