When: Wednesday, November 15, 2023
10:00 am – 12:00 pm (Pacific Time)

Where: Virtual

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Virtual book talk by Professor Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.

Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the communal memory of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Dr. Elyse Semerdjian will discuss her book Remnants wherein tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal the larger history of gender and genocide. However, she will focus her discussion on contextualizing a single 1919 humanitarian portrait of a young woman named Mariam Azarian. While collecting and accessioning process left the genocide victim’s name in oblivion, Semerdjian will showcase her methodological approach to the subject of tattooed Armenian women and the possibilities for recovering information from a mutilated post-genocide archive.

Cosponsored by:

This event is organized by the Armenian Genocide Research Program of the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA and co-sponsored by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the Ararat-Eskijian Museum, and the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.