Those Who Could Save Their World and Those Who Could Not: What Do Family Archives Tell Us?
Ararat-Eskijian Museum and Researchj Center and NAASR
Zoom Registration Link: https://bit.ly/44aiJk9
NAASR YouTube Channel Link: https://www.youtube.com/c/ArmenianStudies
This talk will concentrate on multiple families’ archives kept in Philadelphia, Montreal, and New Jersey. It will primarily utilize a largely untapped and overlooked source, correspondences kept by dispersed Armenian families. It will first introduce these sources, and how these family archives were preserved by Armenian families over generations, and secondly, it will focus on their content, aiming at deciphering the knowledge that has been waiting to be discovered for over a hundred years.
We will focus on the importance of working with the archives of those who survived and those who did not. Those who survived have documented their means of survival, revealing unique strategies, and those who did not have documented how, step by step, they drowned in the disaster, which in turn brings us into their world, a world that was soon to disappear. Freed from hierarchies, and not looking for a particular great incident or event, our minds learn to see in these documents the everydayness of violence, revealing layers of damage to the human soul, as well as an experience that culminated in a much greater catastrophe—genocide itself.
Talin Suciyan is currently Kazan Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at Fresno State University. She is associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies and based in Munich, where she has been teaching and researching at the University of Munich, LMU, for 16 years. She is the author of Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents (I.B. Tauris, 2025), Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces (Syracuse University Press, 2023), and Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-genocide Society, Politics and History (I.B. Tauris, 2016).
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