“Survivors into Minorities: Armenians in Post-Genocide Turkey” with Lerna Ekmekcioglu (MIT)

Speaker:

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is also affiliated with Women and Gender Studies Program. She specializes on Turkish and Armenian lands in the beginning of the 20th century and the history of Armenian feminism. In 2006 she co-edited a volume in Turkish about the first five Armenian feminists of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. Her most recent book, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out from Stanford University Press in early 2016.

About the Talk

This talk follows the trajectories of the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who remained inside Turkish borders after the signing of the 1918 Mudros Armistice (and during the Allied occupation years of Istanbul) and after the 1923 establishment of the new country as the Turkish Republic. How did the Kemalist state treat the remaining Armenians? What were Armenians’ responses to the new (but also old) Turkish regime? I will discuss multiple strategies Armenians –including feminist Armenians– improvised in order to cohabit with unapologetic perpetrators and survive the new Turkey.