Dr. Hrag Papazian, Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies, will present an in-person lecture entitled “Muslim and Alevi Armenians” at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, in the University Business Center, A. Peters Auditorium. The presentation is the second in Dr. Papazian’s three-part series on “Armenians and ‘Other Armenians’ in Contemporary Turkey.”
The lecture will be devoted to the officially Muslim and hence legally “non-Armenian” citizens of the Republic of Turkey who, drawing on their Armenian ancestors, Islamized or Alevized generations earlier, identify as Armenians today. The talk will discuss the contextual developments that facilitated the unprecedented public “coming out” of such individuals during the last few decades and examine these people’s understandings of Armenianness, their experiences in the post-genocidal context, and their relations with the Christian Armenians of Istanbul.
Dr. Hrag Papazian is the Kazan Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at Fresno State. He earned his doctoral degree in anthropology from the University of Oxford (2020), where his dissertation about Armenians in contemporary Turkey was awarded the David Parkin Prize. 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.
The College of Arts and Humanities at Fresno State 