I am currently a history Ph.D. candidate in the Middle East and North Africa Studies Program at Georgetown University. I am applying for the 2025 Huys Foundation Armenian Studies Scholarship with the purpose of allowing me to complete my dissertation, entitled “When Empire Met Nation: Reimagining Armenian Political Identity and Community in the Last Ottoman Century,” and other related scholarly activities.  

I am a historian of the late Ottoman Empire whose research focuses on national and imperial state formation dynamics over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  At turns a political, social and cultural history, my dissertation examines how ideas about nations and empires informed the imaginations and activities of Ottoman Armenians at the beginning of the twentieth century. We are used to thinking of nations and empires as two diametrically opposed forms of political entities. The demands of the former about loyalty to a certain group identity seem to be at odds with states that were defined by hierarchical structure and ethnic plurality. But as a socially, culturally, and geographically nimble community, Ottoman Armenians showed themselves to be remarkably adept at trying to reconcile these challenges that arose in the final decades of Ottoman rule. Armenians staged national public holidays, pioneered new forms of poetry and literature, and sought out and built relations with diplomats with the simultaneous aim of elevating their status as a modern nation while also asserting that they were as much a part of the larger empire as its other constituent ethnic elements. My dissertation situates the Ottoman Armenian experience in a wider world of Middle Eastern and European politics, ideological radicalization, and global transformation. In doing so, my study seeks to reframe our understanding of the Middle East and narratives about nationalism and imperial decline.  

Why is this history and why are these questions so important to not only Armenians but to others as well? One answer that I may proffer is that we have never stopped asking the questions that occupy our discourse on  Armenian geopolitics, culture, and language. These come continuously in my dissertation’s chapters. The celebrations held by Ottoman Armenians in 1913, marking the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the invention of the Armenian alphabet, are a metaphor of a community trying to reconcile internal rifts made more pronounced by new ideas about race and nation. The Armenian Apostolic Church’s efforts to balance its responsibilities for its flock with its status as a religious institution in a constitutional monarchy bring to mind debates on the role of religion in public life today. The recent ethnic cleansing in Artsakh and the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza immediately alert us to another time when diplomacy failed to resolve long-standing issues between the Great Powers and the Ottoman Empire, leading to the outbreak of World War I and the Armenian Genocide. History is therefore an instrument that lets us tease coherence and intimacy from the past, allowing us to take measure of where we were, and where we are going. The more we come to learn from it, the less distant these questions appear to us.

My family’s history has greatly informed me on how I have come to relate to and teach about the past. My great-grandparents came from the large, once-cosmopolitan empires that I focus on in my own research today. Following the violent disintegration of these multiethnic states at the end of the First World War, my grandparents’ families were displaced and forced to settle across the length of the Middle East before finally settling in the Soviet Union. This background has immensely helped me to connect non-Armenian publics with Armenian history and culture. 

This latter is something that Armenian Studies continues to struggle with today, and I have tried my best to bridge this divide throughout my tenure as a scholar, teaching assistant, and instructor of record at Georgetown. Over the years, I have presented widely at Middle East-, Russia-, Eurasia- and World War I-themed conferences. The themes and ideas examined in my dissertation figure into other research projects I am currently working on. Presently, I am involved in a collaborative effort to publish the English-language translation of the WWI-memoir of Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian infantryman on the Russo-Ottoman Front. The memoir is the basis for an upcoming miniseries, for which I am acting as a historical consultant, about the Ottoman Empire, its commissioning of the Armenian Genocide, and the subsequent reprisal actions taken against its main perpetrators. The memoir opens a window onto the First World War era, late Ottoman, imperial Russian, and European politics and society, as well as discussions on the political economy of human rights and the development of international law. Additionally, I am writing an article that examines how Armenian transnational networks and local social conditions in the Ottoman and Russian empires were implicated in pre-WWI high finance and international relations. The article is part of a larger project that I am calling “small nation diplomacy,” which looks at how disenfranchised and otherwise nominally weak national groups like the Armenians in the Middle East, Europe, South Asia and elsewhere wielded the instruments of soft power to secure their political aims during the war. Drawing on my extensive work in archives in the United States, Europe, Russia and Armenia, I hope to cast the transnational connections of this time in a new light and suggest a different way to understand how wars are waged and peace concluded. 

In the classroom, I have turned to a number of strategies to facilitate learning about difficult subject matter arising from Armenian history (the genocide, revolutions, imperial collapse, etc.). I have also translated primary sources from my own research materials and asked students in class to analyze and connect them to lectures and readings. In the spring of 2024, I had the privilege of designing and teaching my own seminar course called “The Great War in the Middle East and Europe, 1914–1923,” which looked at the transnational, political and societal aspects of the war in the Middle East and Europe. Students were encouraged to think of war not only as a time of military activity, but a historical moment that also impacted the environment, gender, and international law. They were asked to draw connections between the region and Europe, and analyze how different national and ethnic groups responded to the challenges unleashed by the war. Employing inclusive teaching methods and class activities, including having them participate in debates, do their own self-grading, and critique visual and material objects, helped acquaint them with a subject that is normally associated exclusively with violence and fighting. While not the exclusive focus of the course, I tried my best to integrate Armenians’ history during this painful period  – the genocide, the establishment of the first republic, the Armenian delegations’ participation at the Paris Peace Conference – into the wider narrative of the Great War. Bringing up my family’s history during the genocide, for instance, I discovered, heartened my students to speak up and often share their own individual stories.

I have striven to uphold my commitment to education outside the sphere of academia as well. In addition to delivering public lectures at Armenian community events and being invited onto Armenian podcasts, I have volunteered for several years in an online language program designed by the AGBU to help young women in Armenia improve their English language and communication skills.

The Huys Scholarship is therefore critical to allow me to continue this work. It will assist me in furthering scholarship in this important field and to complete my dissertation. It will allow me to present at conferences and prepare articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals, and imagine new ways of introducing the world of Armenian history and culture to ever broader and larger audiences. 

Thank you for your time and consideration of my application.

I am aware that Huys Foundation is granting the Huys Scholarship to me with the anticipation of my good faith pursuit and implementation of the projects and undertakings described in this letter, to which I hereby commit.