BELMONT, Mass. — The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will present its first annual Vartan Gregorian Memorial Lecture on Thursday, April 28, at 7:30 p.m. (Eastern) / 4:30 pm (Pacific).The inaugural program will be a webinar presentation by Prof. Houri Berberian of the University of California, Irvine, and Prof. Talinn Grigor of the University of California, Davis, titled “From Bogeyman to HAY KIN: Representations of Armenian Women in Modern Iran.”
Ara Arakelian, nephew of Vartan Gregorian and President of the Friends of Armenian Culture Society, will speak about his late uncle.
The annual NAASR lecture bearing his name will present cutting-edge Armenian Studies scholarship that intersects with some of the many areas that interested Vartan Gregorian as a scholar, such as Armenians in the Near East and the Muslim world, particular Iran; books and libraries; immigration; education; and more.
The webinar is co-sponsored by the Meghrouni Family Centennial Chair in Armenian Studies at UC Irvine and will be accessible live on Zoom (register at https://bit.ly/GregorianLecture2022) and on NAASR’s YouTube Channel.
Vartan Gregorian (April 8, 1934-April 15, 2021) was a brilliant educator, humanitarian, and friend after whom NAASR’s headquarters is named. Born in Tabriz, Iran, he received his secondary education Collège Arménian in Beirut, Lebanon, and he graduated from and received a PhD in history and humanities from Stanford University.
After an academic career spanning two decades, including a period as Tarzian Professor of Armenian and Caucasian History at the University of Pennsylvania, Gregorian served as President of The New York Public Library, President of Brown University, and President of Carnegie Corporation of New York. He was the author of the memoir The Road To Home: My Life And Times as well as The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946 and Islam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith.
