AUA and UConn Discuss Why Oral History Matters

Why Oral History Matters Artwork

By The American University of Armenia Newsroom | Jun 24, 2024

On April 12, students, faculty, and community members from the American University of Armenia (AUA) and the University of Connecticut (UConn) gathered to share their experiences of conducting and participating in oral history projects.

Together, attendees puzzled over questions students posed, anchored in their own practice: how does oral history shift our focus from product or output to process? How do we work with language, particularly where oral history processes move across many different languages and face contexts of linguistic oppression? How do we make recorded and written history more inclusive, non-oppressive, and decolonial?

[This] workshop was a truly meaningful and thought-provoking exchange that opened up many avenues for further exploration and mutual learning between AUA and UConn around oral history research and practice.

Read the full article in The American University of Armenia Newsroom.

Armenian Memory Project Student Showcase

The Armenian Memory Project, led by the Office of Global Affairs, in collaboration with the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute and Department of Digital Media & Design, highlights the power of digital media in telling the Armenian story, ensuring history and heritage are not lost. Join us for student film screenings, archival website exhibitions, and community stories, followed by a reception

Featured works include the following:

Films:

The Memory Keepers - 12 minutes
Created by Aida Gradascevic, Katie McCluney, Ashten Vassar, Jared Linder, and Evgeniia Rein.

The Rupture - 10 minutes
Created by Jonathan Kopeliovich.

Website Exhibits:

Family Bonds Through Time
Created by Mary McGaffigan.

Presentation of Memory and Family Through Jewelry Archives
Created by Grace Pereira Lopes.

Armenian Genocide: Future Generations
Created by Nayeli Contreras.

Free, accessible parking is available in employee and student commuter lots after 5 PM without permit. There are also accessible parking spaces located within the North Garage and South Garage. For more parking information, visit UConn Parking Services.

AMERIKATSI


Film Screening and Q&A with Director Michael Goorjian

From Cinestudio:

Saturday, September 30, 2023
Film at 4:00pm, Talkback at 6:00pm

Director: Michael A. Goorjian 2023, Armenia, 117min., NR
Language: Armenian,Russian,English with English subtitles
Screenwriter: Michael A. Goorjian
Cast: Michael A. Goorjian Hovik Keuchkerian Nelli Uvarova Mikhail Trukhin Jean-Pierre Nshanian Narine Grigoryan Aram Karakhanyan Lernik Harutyunyan

Post Film Q&A Mari Firkatian, a professor of history at the University of Hartford, Hillyer College introduced the film. She teaches Western Civilization and Global History. Her research interests include Minority/majority politics and power relationships in Bulgaria, the politics of food culture, Diaspora studies, Gender History and Nationalism.

After the film, Professor Firkatian lead a conversation with the film’s writer and director, Michael Goorjian.

The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice

This hybrid in-person and virtual event is free and open to the public.

Book Discussion

The 2022 Alice K. Norian Lecture, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice, follows the story of pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a piece of Armenian cultural heritage that for centuries was protected in a remote church until it split in two during the First World War. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh traces the history of the manuscript from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, up to the 2010 lawsuit for the return of eight missing pages of the manuscript from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Watenpaugh’s book shows the human costs of war and expertly demonstrates the case for a human right to art.

Thursday, September 15, 2022
The Konover Auditorium of The Dodd Center for Human Rights
405 Babbidge Road, Storrs, CT 06269

The in-person event will begin with a reception at 5:00PM followed by a book discussion with author Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh at 6:00PM.
Those joining virtually can join this link beginning at 6:00PM: http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/uyrei

About the Author

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She researches the visual cultures of the Middle East. Her first book on the architecture of Aleppo received a book award for urban history from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her new book, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice (Stanford University Press, 2019), is the only book to win awards from both the Society for Armenian Studies and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. It also won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and it was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (non-fiction). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the President of the University of California. Professor Watenpaugh has served on the boards of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Historians of Islamic Art Association, the Syrian Studies Association, and is currently on the board of the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. Professor Watenpaugh is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.

Directions & Parking

Directions to Campus
To get to UConn’s Storrs campus, take I-84 east to exit 68 and turn right onto 195 south or I-84 west to exit 68 and turn left onto Route 195 south. Travel south on Route 195 straight through the intersection with Route 32. At the intersection of Route 195 and Route 44, proceed straight approximately 1.5 miles to the Storrs campus.

Parking
We recommend parking in the South Parking Garage. To get there, at the intersection of Route 195 and North Eagleville Road, proceed straight ahead through two traffic lights. At the third traffic light, turn right onto Mansfield Road. Follow the road as it bears to the right. At the stop sign, turn left onto Gilbert Road. Proceed to the first stop sign and turn right onto Hillside Road. Proceed to the first stop sign and turn left onto Jim Calhoun Way. The entrance to the South Parking Garage will be on your left.

If utilizing GPS, please use 2366 Jim Calhoun Way, Storrs, CT 06269.

View parking rates.

Walking Directions from the South Parking Garage to The Dodd Center
Walking from the South Garage, pass the UConn Bookstore, cross Hillside Road, and walk straight between the School of Business building on your left and the new Student Recreation Center on your right. Continue straight until you reach the Whetten Graduate Center (concrete and brick building). Walk to your right around the Whetten Graduate Center, then around the side of the Whetten building to the right and you will see the back entrance to the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center (blue glass double doors) straight ahead.

Read More

The Armenian Weekly – Armenian Memory Project

By Lillian Avedian, The Armenian Weekly | Feb 9, 2022

"In the spring of 1915, Nigoghos Mazadoorian and his father Garabed came across an early ripening mulberry tree while walking through their orchards in Ichmeh, a village in the Ottoman Armenian province Kharpert. As per the traditional way of collecting mulberries, Nigoghos climbed the tree and shook the branches, and the father and son gathered the fruit that fell to the ground.

“We have tasted the first mulberries of the season. We shall not die this year,” Garabed prophesied.

This is one of many family stories Harry Mazadoorian has shared with the Armenian Memory Project. His grandfather Garabed was imprisoned that year in Soorp Nigoghos Church and later massacred. Mazadoorian’s parents, Nigoghos and Yegsa Aharonian, survived the Armenian Genocide and resettled in Connecticut."

Read the full article in The Armenian Weekly.

Armenian Memory Project: Share Your Family’s Story!

The Armenian Memory Project

As part of the Norian Armenian Programs, the Office of Global AffairsHuman Rights Institute, and Department of Digital Media & Design are leading an initiative to create a variety of digital media archives that tell the Armenian story--ensuring that history and heritage is not lost.

The Department of Digital Media & Design at the University of Connecticut offers a special topics course, cross-listed with the Human Rights Institute and the Honors Program, in which students create a digital representation of Western Armenian communities that once flourished in the pre-1915 Ottoman Empire, but no longer exist in present day. Drawing from primary sources in archives, memoirs, photos, maps, interviews, and first-person narratives, the final projects include documentary films, digital archives, and augmented and virtual reality presentations, thereby reviving communal life, cultural, religious, educational and economic practices for the layperson and students of history.

The Course

This fall, the topic of the course is Human Rights Archives I: Documenting & Curating Community Memory. The course focuses on methods and best practices of collecting and managing digital visual and audio-visual archival assets. Students will apply what they’ve learned about human rights archives, digital asset management, and storytelling by documenting, digitizing, and curating the family stories and artifacts of an immigrant community that bears the multi-generational scars of genocide and displacement.

Tell Your Family's Story

Building upon the past oral history event conducted at the UConn Library Archives, we are asking community members to share their memories, through video recorded interview sessions and scanning of artifacts using our 3D scanner, or documents or photographs you may have that detail life in Armenia before 1915.

Sign up for the dates and location that are convenient for you. Our students and staff will be on hand that day to video record your personal oral history, which will be used to create a documentary-style feature about the Armenian diaspora in Connecticut and New England. If you have an artifact, a family heirloom, or document or image that helps tell your story, our 3-D scanner will be able to create a three-dimensional digital copy for our archives.

Please note that all of our students and staff will be ensuring UConn's COVID-19 guidelines are enforced, including mask-wearing and social distancing, regardless of vaccination status.

We will also ask community volunteers to sign a release form at their scheduled session, prior to recording their stories/artifacts, so that we may have your permission to publish these in a collected volume and/or through various digital platforms.

Should you have any further questions, need assistance completing the form, or to request reasonable accommodations, please contact global@uconn.edu, or call 860-486-3152.

Armenian Genocide Commemoration

Tsitsernakaberd - The Armenian Genocide memorial complex is Armenia official memorial dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan, Armenia.

Saturday, April 24, 2021
Zoom Program begins at 10:30am with Martyrs Service

The Armenian Genocide Commemoration Committee of Connecticut will host an online commemoration of the 106th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on Saturday, Apr. 24, at 10:30 a.m. EDT, over the Zoom video platform. Clergy from the state’s four Armenian churches will offer the “Prayer for the Holy Martyrs of the Armenian Genocide.” The flag of the Republic of Armenia will be raised and fly over the Connecticut State Capitol for a week. In addition to the martyrs of 1915, the commemorative program will focus on last fall’s events in Artsakh and Armenia, with speakers including Armenian journalist/author Tatul Hakobyan (on “Why did the 44-day war take place?”) and Hamazkayin’s Lilly Torosyan (on “A Connecticut Armenian’s personal account of the 44-day war”). John Geragosian, Connecticut State Auditor, will be M.C.

Pre-registration is required to obtain the Zoom link. Click here to register.

(If you are unable to pre-register online, or do not have Zoom capability, call (860) 651-0629.)

UConn Filmmakers Premiere Armenian Memory Project

Thursday October 29, the University of Connecticut and other co-sponsors premiered “The Dildilians: A Story of Photography and Survival” on YouTube. The film was produced by students in the UConn course “Variable Topics: Visual Representations of Armenian Memory” taught by filmmaker Catherine Masud, in close collaboration with Dildilian family historian Armen Marsoobian.

The film tells the story of a family of Armenian photographers, the Dildilians, who captured a way of life in central Turkey that disappeared during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The documentary is brought to life through the voices of family descendants, supplemented by historical photographs and documents from the family archive.

The online screening platform allowed people to watch together from all over the country and around the world in countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Canada.

“Hello all together from Germany!” YouTube user Heinrich Geuther commented during the film.

The virtual film screening on YouTube was followed by a live panel discussion opened by MC Zahra Ali, Director of Global Partnerships and Outreach who introduced the panelists. The panel, moderated by Heather Elliott-Famularo, included Masud, adjunct instructor for UConn Digital Media & Design and the Human Rights Institute, Marsoobian, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University, and School of Fine Arts students Aidan Brueckner, Jonathan Pico and Bridget Sweeney who all contributed to the production of the film.

The students worked with Marsoobian’s family photography archive which included scanning glass negative photographs to create graphics for the film. It was a process they had to be very careful with, but one of the best parts of the project Sweeney said. “I had never even held a glass negative before that class,” Sweeney said. “To think that they’ve been around for so long was so incredible. I really enjoyed holding the physical archives.”

Stories from the past can play an important role in fostering dialogue among different peoples, Marsoobian said. We have to bear witness to those ancestors. “Whether they’re Armenian ancestors in Ottoman Turkey or they’re ancestors in Ireland,” Marsoobian said, “it’s important to give those ancestors a voice and it’s also important for our own identity to understand who we are and where we’ve come from.”

The story of our ancestors is our story that we carry through the past, with us in the present and into the future, Masud expressed. We need to connect those dots and feel that sense of responsibility to acknowledge our history.

“It’s very important to look at this story of the Dildilians and the Armenian genocide as also, in one way or another, the story of us all,” Masud said.

The event was co-sponsored by the University of Connecticut (Norian Armenian Programs, Office of Global Affairs, School of Social Work, Human Rights Institute, Digital Media and Design), the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Inc. and the Ararat-Eskijian Museum.

The Dildilians: A Story of Photography and Survival

Event - #11 Family Survivors 1922 Photo

Photo Credit: Tsolag K. Dildilian, 1922

Virtual Film Screening and Panel Discussion

Date: Thursday, October 29, 2020

6:00 PM EDT Film Screening (Click to watch the film)

6:30 PM EDT Panel Discussion (Click to watch the recorded discussion)

This event is free and open to the public.


Film Synopsis

During the 19th and early 20th centuries a remarkable family of Armenian photographers, the Dildilians, captured a time and a way of life in Anatolia in central Turkey that was soon to disappear during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. This documentary, which is the product of a unique collaboration between filmmaker Catherine Masud, Dildilian family historian Armen Marsoobian, and a talented group of University of Connecticut students, tells the story of that lost community through the voices of family descendants, supplemented by historical photographs and documents from the family archive.

To request reasonable accommodations  for people with disabilities and for any other questions regarding the event, please contact global@uconn.edu.

Panelists

Profile - Catherine Masud

Catherine Masud
Award-winning Filmmaker
Instructor, Digital Media & Design
University of Connecticut

Profile - Armen Marsoobian

Armen Marsoobian
Dildilian Family Historian

Profile - Heather Elliott-Famularo

Moderated by:
Heather Elliott-Famularo
Department Head, Digital Media and Design
University of Connecticut

Joined by a select group of UConn Digital Media and Design students that assisted with production:

Aidan Brueckner (SFA '21)
Jonathan Pico (SFA '21)
Bridget Sweeney (SFA '21)

 

Zeynep Gursel: Portraits of Unbelonging

National Association for Armenian Studies and Research Logo

Date: Sunday, July 26, 2020
Time: 5:00 PM EDT

Register Online

This event is free and open to the public.

On Sunday, July 26 at 5 pm ET (2 pm PT), in partnership with the Ararat-Eskijian Museum and Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, we will present an online talk by Zeynep Devrim Gürsel entitled "Portraits of Unbelonging: Photography, the Ottoman State, and the Making of Armenian Emigrants, 1896-1908."

You have the option of attending on Zoom or via livestream on YouTube.

To attend on Zoom, advance registration is required and space is limited. Please note that registrations must be completed prior to the start of the event. Zoom attendees have the opportunity to submit written questions via Zoom which will be asked as time permits.

Zoom Registration link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oLkAvrJxQDGiaV8l_AZAnA

To view live on YouTube, go to NAASR's channel a few minutes before the start of the program. (No registration is required.) NAASR's YouTube channel is always at this address:

https://www.youtube.com/c/ArmenianStudies

You can also find us on YouTube by searching for "NAASR"+"Armenian Studies." If you are new to our YouTube channel, we invite you to explore the many event videos there, and please contact us if you have any questions or problems.

Portraits of Unbelonging investigates the history of Ottoman Armenian emigration from the Ottoman east to the United States from the politically fraught and often violent 1890s to the end of Abdülhamid II's reign in 1909. Between 1896 and 1909, Ottoman Armenian subjects could emigrate legally only if they renounced their nationality and promised to never return to the empire. Having their photograph taken was a key step in the process. These photos recorded their “renunciation of nationality” and became one of the first uses of photography to police borders anywhere in the world.

The goal of Portraits of Unbelonging is to link an Ottoman Armenian past to an American future to create a double-sided history of migration. Gursel follows the stories of emigrant families over a century through official documents, ship manifests, and family photo albums. This involves traveling all around the United States to meet with descendants of those photographed and hear what became of the families first encountered in the Ottoman archives.

Dr. Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (Univ. of California Press, 2016) and the director of the award-winning ethnographic film Coffee Futures. For more than a decade she has been researching photography in the late Ottoman period.

This program is co-sponsored by the Ararat-Eskijian Museum, Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, and NAASR.