FRESNO — Dr. Houri Berberian and Dr. Talinn Grigor will give a presentation on their new book, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860-1979, at 7 p.m. on Monday, August 25, in the Grosse Industrial Technology Building, Room 101, on the Fresno State campus.
With this book, Berberian and Grigor offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women’s organizations, the authors trace minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran’s central nodes of power, and the Iranian-Armenian patriarchal institutions of church and political parties.
Engaging broader considerations around modernization, nationalism and feminism, this book makes a conceptually rich contribution to how we think about the history of women and minoritized peoples. Berberian and Grigor read archival, textual, visual, and oral history sources together and against one another to challenge conventional notions of “the archive” and transform silences and absences into audible and visual presences. Understanding minoritarian politics as formulated by women through their various forms of public and intellectual activisms, this book provides a groundbreaking intervention in Iran’s history of modernization, Armenian diasporic history, and Iranian and Armenian feminist historiography.
Berberian is professor of history, Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies and director of the Center for Armenian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on late 19th- and early 20th-century transimperial Armenian history, especially revolutionary movements and women and gender.
Grigor is professor of art history in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on 18th- to 20th-century architectural and art histories through postcolonial, race, feminist, and critical theories grounded in Iran, Armeno-Iran, Armenia, and Parsi India.
Copies of the new book, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860-1979, will be on sale at the event. The lecture is free and open to the public. For information about upcoming Armenian Studies Program presentations, visit https://fresnostate.edu/armenianstudies.
