Conference
   

Thiose Who Could Save Their World and Those Who Could not:What Do Family Archives Tell US

Ararat-Eskijian-Museum and Research Center AND NAASR


Thiose Who Could Save Their World and Those Who Could not:What Do Family Archives Tell US
19 mai 2025   4:30 PM
LIVE ON ZOOM AND YOUTUBE
Zoom Registration Link: https://bit.ly/44aiJk9
NAASR YouTube Channel Link: https://www.youtube.com/c/ArmenianStudies
California - United States

This talk will concentrate on multiple families’ archives kept in Philadelphia, Montreal, and

New Jersey. It will primarily utilize a largely untapped and overlooked source,

correspondences kept by dispersed Armenian families. It will first introduce these sources,

and how these family archives were preserved by Armenian families over generations, and

secondly, it will focus on their content, aiming at deciphering the knowledge that has been

waiting to be discovered for over a hundred years.

We will focus on the importance of working with the archives of those who survived and

those who did not. Those who survived have documented their means of survival, revealing

unique strategies, and those who did not have documented how, step by step, they

drowned in the disaster, which in turn brings us into their world, a world that was soon to

disappear. Freed from hierarchies, and not looking for a particular great incident or event,

our minds learn to see in these documents the everydayness of violence, revealing layers

of damage to the human soul, as well as an experience that culminated in a much greater

catastrophe—genocide itself.

Talin Suciyan is currently Kazan Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies

at Fresno State University. She is associate professor of Middle Eastern

Studies and based in Munich, where she has been teaching and

researching at the University of Munich, LMU, for 16 years. She is the

author of Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival

Reader of USSR Consular Documents (I.B. Tauris, 2025), Outcasting

Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces (Syracuse University Press, 2023), and Armenians in

Modern Turkey: Post-genocide Society, Politics and History (I.B. Tauris, 2016).