Dr. Hrag Papazian has been named as the 19th Henry S. Khanzadian Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies at Fresno State for the Fall 2022 semester.
Dr. Papazian has taught as an Adjunct Lecturer at the American University of Armenia from Fall 2019 until Spring 2021 and taught three courses there: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Geography, and Research Methods.
As part of his duties as Kazan Visiting Professor, Dr. Papazian teaches the course, “From Genocide to Post-Genocide Experience: Armenians under Late Ottoman and Turkish Republican Rule.” The goal of the course is to examine the history of the Armenian Genocide in the late Ottoman period and explore the fate of survivors who remained in the emerging Republic of Turkey until contemporary times.
While at Fresno State, Dr. Papazian scheduled a series of public lectures on Armenians and “other Armenians’ in contemporary Turkey. These include:
- “The Christian Armenian Community,” on Sept. 9
- “Muslim and Alevi Armenians,” on Oct. 7
- “The Migrants from Armenia in Contemporary Turkey,” on Nov. 1
“My public lectures aim to present and discuss contemporary Turkey’s Armenian population in its diversity: the Christian Armenians, the Muslim and Alevi Armenians, and the migrants from Armenia,” said Papazian. “I hope that my three-part lecture series will enlighten attendees about the Armenian experience in postgenocidal Turkey, about the parallel regimes of religious and racial exclusion in the country, as well as about the heterogeneous, socially constructed, and often contested nature of Armenian (and in fact all) identities.”
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Dr. Hrag Papazian attended and graduated from Hamazkayin “Djemaran” College. He received his Master of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and then continued with his Doctor of Philosophy studies at the same institution. His doctoral dissertation was “Contesting Armenianness: Plurality, Segregation, and Multilateral Boundary Making among Armenians in Contemporary Turkey.”
His thesis also received an honorary mention in the Society for Armenian Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award competition (2017-2020). Before coming to Fresno, Papazian was a Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and an Adjunct Lecturer at the American University of Armenia.
Dr. Papazian’s research interests focus on issues of identity, group formation, intergroup relations, ethnicity, nationalism, diaspora and transnationalism, and politics and conflict. His doctoral research was on Armenians in contemporary Turkey, but he has also been conducting research in Armenia for the past two years.
For information about Dr. Papazian’s lectures, please follow Armenian Studies on its Facebook page or visit the Armenian Studies Program website.
The College of Arts and Humanities at Fresno State 