Editorial Board

Editor

Dzovinar Derderian received her PhD in 2019 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of Middle East Studies. Her dissertation is titled “Nation-Making and the Language of Colonialism: Voices from Ottoman Van in Armenian Print Media and Handwritten Petitions, 1820s to 1870s.” She received her BA from Tufts University and her MA from Georgetown University. She has co-edited a volume entitled The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics (I.B. Tauris, 2016). She currently serves on the Executive Council of the Society of Armenian Studies and on the editorial board of Études arménnienes contemporaines.

Advisor

Bedross Der Matossian is the President of the Society for Armenian Studies. He is an Associate Professor of History and the vice-chair of the Department of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Anna Aleksanyan is a PhD candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her dissertation explores gendered aspects of the Armenian Genocide in the experiences of its female victims. Before starting her PhD, Anna worked at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute as a researcher for seven years. She received her BA and MA in History at Yerevan State University. She has published both in academic journals and in non-academic publications in Armenian, English, Russian, French, and Turkish.

Jesse Siragan Arlen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research pertains to medieval literature and intellectual history, with a special interest in asceticism, mysticism, literature, and education in Eastern Christianity and Islam. His articles have appeared in journals such as Viator, Hugoye, and Manuscripta. His dissertation centers on Anania Narekatsʿi. He is also a published writer of Western Armenian, whose prose and poetry have appeared in journals such as Pakine and Inknagir.

Varak Ketsemanian is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He holds a BA in Philosophy and History from the American University of Beirut. He received his MA degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. Ketsemanian works on late Ottoman history with a particular focus on the internal administration of the Armenian community. His dissertation focuses on the development of constitutional practices and bodies among Armenians in the provinces, and their impact on inter and intra-communal relations. Ketsemanian has published articles in the  Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Nora Lessersohn is a PhD student in U.S. History at University College London, supported by a Calouste Gulbenkian Armenian Studies Scholarship. She earned her A.M. in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University (2015) and her A.B. in the Study of Religion at Harvard College (2009). Her work uses the life writing and life narratives of Armenian Americans to examine themes such as nationalism, belonging, identity, and representation. She has published articles in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Erin Piñon is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology, where she works on the visual and material culture of late-medieval and early modern Armenia. Her dissertation focuses on the expansion and development of the Armenian iconographic repertoire within illuminated manuscripts and early printed materials from Vaspurakan and Constantinople. She is a contributing author to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition catalogue Armenia: Art, Religion and Trade in the Middle Ages and Dadivank, The Revived Miracle.

Ararat Sekeryan is a PhD student in Slavic Languages & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He holds a BA in Russian from Istanbul University. Between 2009 and 2011, he respectively studied Polish and Russian at Jagiellonian University (Krakow) and Pushkin Institute (Moscow). Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, he received an MA degree in Comparative Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University, where he mainly worked on early twentieth-century Western Armenian poetry. He is particularly interested in the questions of trauma and memory; theory and practice of translation; Late/Post Soviet Armenian and Azerbaijani literature and culture; Russian emigre literature.

Christopher Sheklian has served as the Director of the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center at the Armenian Church of America (Eastern Diocese) in New York since September 2018. Prior to this, he was a 2017-2018 Manoogian Post-doctoral Fellow in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan. Dr. Sheklian majored in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, continuing his education at the University of Chicago, earning first an MA in Anthropology. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2017 after defending his thesis titled “Theology and the Community: The Armenian Minority, Tradition, and Secularism in Turkey.” Dr. Sheklian specializes in the Anthropology of religion and secularism, studying the role of liturgy and law on the lives of religious minorities. His has published in the journal Turkish Studies. 

Anoush Tamar Suni is currently a Manoogian Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. Her dissertation, entitled “Palimpsests of Violence: Ruination and the Politics of Memory in Anatolia,” investigated questions of memory and the material legacies of state violence in the region of Van in southeastern Turkey with a focus on the historic Armenian and contemporary Kurdish communities. For her dissertation, between 2015 and 2017, Anoush spent over two years in Van and Istanbul conducting ethnographic research. Before UCLA, she completed her B.A. in Middle East Studies at Pomona College and her M.A. in Turkish Studies at Sabanci University in Istanbul.