NAASR to Host Webinar on Avedis Derounian Archive at NAASR

Dr. Charles Gallagher, associate professor of history at Boston College, is author of Vatican Secret Diplomacy: Joseph P. Hurley and Pope Pius XII (Yale Univ. Press, 2008) and The Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten History of the Christian Front, 1939-1945 (Harvard Univ. Press, 2021).

Dr. Christopher Vials, professor of English and director of American Studies at UConn (Storrs), author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2014) and co-editor of The Antifascism Reader (Verso Books, 2020).

In the late 1930s and 1940s Armenian-American author and journalist Avedis Derounian (1909-91) went underground and infiltrated and collected materials on the full spectrum of U.S.-based extremist groups, particular those sympathetic to or in league with the political aims of the Nazis. He wrote about his experiences under the pen name John Roy Carlson. His book Under Cover became a New York Times bestseller with at least 20 reprintings. He also wrote The Plotters (1946) and Cairo to Damascus (1951).

Donated to NAASR after his death in 1991, the collection is one of NAASR’s most significant personal archives, comprising more than 75 boxes of unpublished writings, notes, photographs, and other materials. His fascinating life experiences and dogged research, contained in his archive, reveal striking details about domestic fascist, pro-Nazi and other extreme right-wing groups of that time, and how Derounian and other writers and activists worked to expose these forces.

This program is made possible by a grant from Mass Humanities, which provided funding through the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC). Mass Humanities is a state-based affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

For more information contact NAASR at hq@naasr.org.