FRESNO — The Armenian Studies Program will hold an international conference on “The Committee of Union and Progress: Founders, Ideology, and Structure” on Friday, October 12, and Saturday, October 13. The conference will be held in the University Business Center (5245 N. Backer Ave.), A. Peters Auditorium, Room 191 on the Fresno State campus.
The conference focuses on the Committee of Union and Progress, whose members were the political leaders of Ottoman Turkey throughout most of the period from 1908 to 1915. They had become the virtual political dictators of Ottoman Turkey on the eve of World War I and the Armenian Genocide. The decision-making processes and ideology of the CUP were to have drastic consequences for the Armenians in particular. The conference participants will analyze carious aspects of the CUP and also its relationships with the Armenians.
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 (Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem) are co-organizers of the Conference.
Prof. Barlow Der Mugrdechian will open the Conference at 7 p.m. on Friday, October 12 in the University Business Center, Alice Peters Auditorium. A keynote address will be given by Dr. Raymond Kevorkian (Paris) on “The Young Turk Regime: Ideology in Command.”
The first session will then open with two panelists: Hans-Lukas Kieser (University of Sydney, Australia) “Talaat Pasha and Ziya Gökalp”; Dugu Coskuntuna (Princeton University) “Homeland and Nation Revisited: A Discourse Analysis of the Memoirs of the Young Turks.”
