Speaker: Armen Manuk-Khaloyan, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Georgetown University
Date & Time: August 18th, 2022 at 7pm Yerevan time (11:00-12:30am EDT)
Language: English
The second half of the nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth century bore witness to a dizzying array of political, economic, and cultural shocks all across the world, from new state formations in Europe and interimperial rivalry in Africa and Asia, to novel technological innovations, economic disruption, and the rise of radical and extremist ideologies of varying hue and intensity. How did Armenians in the Ottoman Empire react and respond to these changes? How did they, as a highly visible and socially and geographically mobile community with uniquely transnational ties, conceptualize the challenges of the period and go about remaking the world around them? These are some of the questions that Manuk-Khaloyan’s dissertation poses and attempts to answer. It adopts a thematic approach that focuses on several key episodes of everyday Ottoman Armenian life to see how their relationship toward cultural heritage, national identity, sex and gender, and other spheres of society gave meaning to ideas and set the tone of social and political discourse in the empire. While this talk will provide a brief overview of these themes, it will also try to demonstrate why we should listen to the stories of this once-dynamic community and why they should be integrated into broader narratives of the history of the Middle East, Europe, and the wider world.
Armen Manuk-Khaloyan is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Georgetown University. His research focuses primarily on Ottoman Armenian social and political life from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. More broadly, he is interested in the formation and relationship between empires and nation-states, the emergence of mass-oriented middle-class society, and the dynamics of transnational identity and globalization in the modern era.
Armen Manuk-Khaloyan is also an ARISC Fellow who had been awarded the ARISC Research Fellowship. Funding for this fellowship is provided by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) through a grant to the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC). This event is sponsored by the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). The lectures are free and open to the public. Learn more at www.arisc.org
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