Public lecture

What We Carry: An Armenian Journey through Memory, Place, and Belonging

Armenian Research Center, University of Michigan-Dearborn

Registration

15 sept. 2026 7:00 PM

AGBU Alex & Marie Manoogian School
22001 Northwestern Highway
Southfield, MI 48075

Michigan - United States

What We Carry: An Armenian Journey through Memory, Place and Belonging

Dr. Hakem Al-Rustom

Tuesday

September 15, 2026

7 PM

AGBU Alex & Marie Manoogian School

22001 Northwestern Highway

Southfield, MI 48075

What do Armenians carry with them when home exists partly as a place, partly as a memory, and partly as something lost? In this personal and illustrated lecture, Dr. Hakem Al-Rustom reflects on how his own life and travels led him to study Armenians whose lives connect Turkey, France, and the wider diaspora. Through family histories, research encounters, and photographs of churches, neighborhoods, cemeteries, and other community spaces, he will tell stories of people who have preserved a relationship to places from which they or their ancestors were separated. The lecture explores, in accessible terms, how memory and belonging endure across borders and generations--and how Armenians continue to make meaningful lives in the presence of loss.

Dr. Hakem Al-Rustom is an anthropologist and historian whose work focuses on Christians in and of of the Middle East, particularly Armenians in Turkey and France. He is the author of Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide (Columbia University Press, 2026) and co-editor of Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press, 2010). Dr. Al-Rustom has taught anthropology and history at the London School of Economics, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Michigan.

Admission is free and open to all

Books will be available for purchase at a discounted price--cash only.

Light refreshments will be provided.

The University of Michigan-Dearborn does not necessarily endorse the speaker's views.

For more information, contact Gerald Ottenbreit at 313-593-5181 or gottenbr@umich.edu

Registration