FRESNO — The Armenian Studies Program will hold an international conference exploring the topic of “Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds: A People’s History of the Ottoman Empire” to be held on Friday, September 22, and Saturday, September 23. The conference will be held in the University Business Center (5245 N. Backer Ave.), A. Peters Auditorium, Room 191 on the Fresno State campus.
Ottoman history is often studied through the lens of Ottoman Turkish archives, sometime neglecting the important contribution of Armenian and other sources to the construction of that history. The invited scholars are innovators in this area utilizing Armenian and other archival sources for their papers. The Conference focuses on the pre-1915 Genocide period in the Ottoman Empire, with papers featuring micro-histories of various regions.
The conference is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Humanities and the Department of History at Fresno State. The Thomas A. Kouymjian Family Foundation, the Leon S. Peters Foundation and the M. Victoria Kazan Fund for Armenian Studies are supporters of the conference.
Armenian Studies Program Coordinator Prof. Barlow Der Mugrdechian and Dr. Ümit Kurt (Harvard University) are co-organizers of the conference.
Der Mugrdechian will open the Conference at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, September 22 in the University Business Center, Alice Peters Auditorium, Room 191. An hors d’oeuvres reception will take place from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the University Business Center Gallery, just prior to the conference.
Following the opening address, the first session will open with three panelists: Owen Miller (Union University) “The Colonization of the Mountains: Sasun, Zeytun and Dersim at the End of the Ottoman Empire”; David Gutman (Manhattanville College) “The Sojourners of Harput (Kharpert): At the Intersection of the Local, the Imperial, and the Global”; and Ugur Z. Peçe (Harvard University) “From Ballots to Barracks: The Conscription of non-Muslims at a Time of Parliamentary Politics in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1912.”
