News & Events

SAS Annual Membership Meeting and Conference on “Armenians in America”

The Society for Armenian Studies
to Hold its 42nd Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts

The 42nd SAS Membership Meeting will be held at 4:00PM on Thursday, November
17, in Salon B (4) of the Boston Marriott Copley Place Hotel. All members
are welcome to attend the annual meeting.

Conference to be held on “Armenians in America”

The Society for Armenian Studies (SAS) is planning an international
conference, “The Armenians in America,” to take place on Thursday, November
17, 2016, in Boston, Massachusetts.

The SAS organized conference on “The Armenians in America,” will have two
panels, beginning at 1:00PM in Salon B (4) of the Boston Marriott Copley
Place Hotel and is open to the public.

In the first panel on “Travel, Collective Memory and Homeland among
Armenian-Americans,” chaired by Marc Mamigonian (National Association for
Armenian Studies and Research, NAASR), four participants will present
papers: Margaret Manoogian (Western Oregon University) and Anny Bakalian
(Emerita Associate Director MEMEAC, CUNY), “Connections for Families
Disrupted: Travels to Anatolia by Diasporans”; Carel Bertram (San Francisco
State University), “Coming to Terms with Home and Homeland”; and Sona
Nersisyan (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of
Sciences of Armenia), “Homeland Perception and Identity Construction: the
Case of Los Angeles Armenian Community.”

In the second panel on “Diversities of Armenianness in American and
Diasporic Contexts,” chaired by Vahe Sahakyan (University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor), the presenters will be: Anatolii Tokmancev (UCLA), “Armenian
Jehovah’s Witnesses: Nationalism in a Strictly Non-Nationalist Sect”;
Shushan Karapetyan (UCLA), “Language in Diaspora: Problematizing Ideology,
Identity, and Symbolism” and Helen Makhdoumian (University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign), “Inheritance of Exile: Negotiating Memory, Home, and
Belonging in Armenian-American Literature about the Lebanese Civil War.”

The SAS is sponsoring a panel during the regular MESA sessions at 1:45PM on
Friday, November 18, entitled “New Issues, Perspectives, and Sources in
Armenian Studies,” chaired by SAS President Barlow Der Mugrdechian
(California State University, Fresno), with the participation of Anna
Aleksanyan (Clark University) “Ritualized Rapes and Body Destruction of the
Armenian Women During the Genocide”; Emre Can Daglioglu (Clark University),
“Revisiting the Ottoman courts-martial of 1919-1920 Under the Light of New
Archival Documents”; Varak Ketsamanian (Princeton University), “The
Hunchakian Revolutionary Party from 1891-1895”; and Arda Melkonian (UCLA),
““Human Trafficking” during the Armenian Genocide.” Ümit Kurt (Harvard
University) will be the discussant for the panel.

SAS is also co-sponsoring, with the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association,
a roundtable discussion on “Knowledge Production, Exclusion, Inclusion: The
Repositioning of Armenians in Ottoman and Turkish Historiography,” with the
participation of Carel Bertram (San Francisco State University), Bedross Der
Matossian (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), David E. Gutman (Manhattanville
College), Alyson Wharton (University of Lincoln [UK]), Rachel Goshgarian
(Lafayette College), and Yasar Tolga Cora (University of Michigan), and
Lerna Ekmekcioglu (M. I. T.). The roundtable will take place at noon on
Saturday, November 19.

More than ten other Armenian-themed papers will be given by scholars during
the course of the MESA conference, November 17-20. For a full program of
MESA sessions, please visit their website at
https://mesana.org/mymesa/meeting_program_list.php?list=1.

SAS Secretariat