FRESNO — Dr. Ümit Kurt, a Research Fellow at Harvard University will present talk on “The Curious Case of Armenian Genocide Perpetrator Ahmed Faik Bey” 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 7, in the University Business Center, Alice Peters Auditorium, Room 191, on the Fresno State campus.
The lecture is part of the Armenian Studies Program Spring 2017 Lecture Series, with the support of the Leon S. Peters Foundation.
Within the publications on the history of Armenian Genocide, studies on the perpetrators received and continue to receive special attention. Seen from a wider perspective, it is rather important to make scholarly investigations and public debate regarding the executors of the Armenian Genocide. Even when the agents of Genocide were not explicitly mentioned, the consequences of their deeds remained all too visible to ignore them. Yet historians, that is to say those who defined it as their job to find out ‘what really happened’, over an extended period of time left it to others to deal with the issue of perpetration.
This talk focuses on one major perpetrator, Ahmed Faik Erne (1879-1967), his background, deeds, activities and leading involvement in the 1915 Armenian deportation and genocide as well as his life story in the post-genocide period in modern Turkey.
Kurt completed his PhD in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program in the History Department of Clark University in 2016. His dissertation was entitled “Destruction of Aintab Armenians and Emergence of the New Wealthy Class: Plunder of Armenian Wealth in Aintab (1890s–1920s).” He is currently a research fellow at Harvard University.
Kurt has written extensively on confiscation of Armenian properties, Armenian Genocide, early modern Turkish nationalism, and Aintab Armenians. He is the author of the Great, hopeless Turkish race: fundamentals of Turkish nationalism in the Turkish homeland 1911-1916 (Istanbul: Iletisim Publishing House, 2012) and editor of the Revolt and Destruction: Construction of the state from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic and collective violence (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Publishing House, 2015). He teaches history at Sabanci University in Istanbul and is the author, with Taner Akçam, of The spirit of the laws: the plunder of wealth in the Armenian Genocide (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015).
