The Society for Armenian Studies announced that Dr. Thomas Sinclair is the 2025 recipient of the “The Nina G. Garsoïan Research Grant for Ancient and Early Mediaeval Armenian History,” for his research project on “Dvin in the 7th to 11th centuries A.D.” The grant, of $1000, is funded by Dr. Levon Avdoyan, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York in ancient and Armenian history under the supervision of Prof. Garsoïan.
“SAS is please to award Dr. Sinclair the Garsoïan Research Grant,” said SAS President Barlow Der Mugrdechian. “Dr. Sinclair’s research will open new perspectives on Armenia’s medieval history.”
“I am extremely grateful to the Society for Armenian Studies for selecting me as the recipient of the Garsoian Scholarship this year,” said Dr. Sinclair. “The award is a special honor for me, since I met Professor Garsoian several times in the USA and was always an admirer of her knowledge of languages and rigorous interpretation of texts. Levon Avdoian too, who instituted the scholarship, I met in the US and in his work could see the imprint of Garsoian’s methods and interests.”
“The scholarship will enable me to work on questions to do with the city of Dvin, which I see as part of a chain of cities running south to Xlatʿ (Ahlat) and others with Armenian populations such as Arzan and Baghesh/Bitlis. I shall co-operate with staff at the Historical Museum and hope to develop interests with them. I shall work on a hoard of coins of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VIII found at Dvin (explanations needed, as Byzantine forces seem never to have captured Dvin). I shall examine the site of Dvin and various archaeological finds to give body to the impressions I have gathered from publications. The scholarship will give an impetus to a wider program: in the first place to form a picture of the cities immediately before the Turkish raids beginning in the 1040s and to form the equivalent picture in the fifty-year period after. The project’s second interest is to put the cities in the context of trade and increasing prosperity in Europe and strictly Byzantine territory in the tenth and eleventh centuries.”