Based on 72 in-depth narrative interviews in Berlin and Strasbourg, examines how Armenians with differing migration histories engage with diaspora communities and institutions, identifying three distinct routes of engagement and developing the concept of 'diaspora dynamics': engagement as conditional and negotiated rather than automatic.
Examines a growing religious divide within the Ottoman Empire's Armenian population around 1700, a divide that reshaped the culture, institutions and politics of their communities for the next two centuries. Before the late seventeenth century essentially all Ottoman Armenians belonged to the traditional Armenian Church; within a few decades many converted to Catholicism while others developed a trenchant anti-Catholic group identity. Ohanian identifies four drivers: the expansion of Roman Catholic missionary efforts, the unprecedented availability of Armenian-language books through printing and long-distance circulation, shifting Ottoman-French diplomatic relations, and the complexities of Ottoman imperial administration. The study draws on sources in Classical Armenian, vernacular Armenian, Ottoman Turkish and French from more than a dozen archives.
Examines how the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988–1994), the 1988 Spitak earthquake, and the collapse of the USSR triggered a mass wave of Soviet Armenian refugees and migrants into the diaspora, especially Los Angeles County. Argues these crises 'broached the Iron Curtain,' reconnecting a polarized diaspora with the homeland while simultaneously driving a mass exodus out of it. Explores the nuanced, sometimes tense relationship between long-settled Armenian-Americans and newly arrived Soviet Armenians. Places Artsakh and homeland crises at the center of modern diaspora-homeland dynamics.
Instagram images of Yerevan’s 1967 Mother Armenia statue were reworked during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war by users in Armenia and the diaspora, linking monument memory with visual appropriation.
The dissertation analyzes medieval Armenian kafas added to the Alexander Romance, translating poetic encounters and mapping their links to geography, historiography, apocalypse, and Christian cosmology.
An ethnography of Armenianness in contemporary Turkey compares Christian Armenians, Muslim or Alevi citizens reclaiming ancestry, and migrants from the Republic of Armenia.
Analyses literary and filmic works to argue for the post-national and post-catastrophic character of diaspora Armenian culture in or involving the Western Armenian language. After 1915, Western Armenian survivors were forced into exile carrying with them a modern national literary language. Through readings of Shahan Shahnour, Nigoghos Sarafian, Gariné Torossian, Vahé Oshagan and Krikor Beledian, Jallatyan traces the forms in which a diasporic Armenian culture is inscribed at the limits of realist and positivist practices of representation. He engages the 'diasporic pessimism' that predicts inevitable assimilation and advocates preserving Western Armenian identity until return becomes possible. Appendices include synopses of Vahé Oshagan's prose and an Armenian transliteration system.
Combining archives, cultural texts, interviews, and participant observation, the dissertation follows Armenian displacement from early-modern trans-imperial networks through racial classification, orphan imagery, Soviet emancipation, and post-Soviet development work.
Interviews with three generations of Colorado Armenians examine identity work in a community estimated at 2,916 people. A Denver Saturday school, Apostolic churches, a genocide khachkar, the Sardarapat highway sign, and SOAR charity link language, religion, memorialization, and assistance to Armenia.
Analyzes the emergence of 'ethnopolitical entrepreneurs' (novel political agents in evolving suburban immigrant spaces, or 'ethnoburbs') through a case study of the Armenian community of Glendale, California. Fittante argues that Glendale's Armenians, while possessing their own history and character, reflect dynamics also visible in other American suburban immigrant communities, and that these communities force scholars to rethink traditional assumptions about the settlement and political incorporation of newcomers. The dissertation reorients the scholarship on group political incorporation by unpacking the role these brokers play in mobilizing co-ethnic constituencies. Los Angeles Armenians naturalize at roughly twice the national rate, and in Glendale they form a demographic plurality approaching 40 percent.
Set against Los Angeles as home to one of the largest and most heterogeneous Armenian diasporic communities, this study examines identity negotiation, family relations and community networks. It asks what happens when people are not encouraged to accept their identity in all its diversity, and what choices they make when one component of identity conflicts with another. It documents the strategies of Los Angeles lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer Armenians in reconciling multiple identities, finding that they use distinct disclosure strategies with family and with community members in order to belong and to maintain coexisting relationships. It examines the influence of ethnic-based institutions, family values and cultural norms on those experiences, based on interviews with LGBQ Armenian adults aged 21–51.
Interviews with twelve Armenian Quebecers trace how school, church, and family support cultural continuity while also teaching French and Quebec social norms. Respondents describe institutional completeness as a basis for both Armenian identity and civic integration amid inherited genocide trauma.
Fieldwork in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Lebanon compares the integration of Armenians displaced from Syria between 2011 and 2016. The thesis weighs economic conditions, cultural difference, nostalgia, state policy, and NGO support, concluding that livelihood security most strongly shapes settlement outcomes.
The dissertation traces migration from the Ottoman homeland to the United States and then examines diaspora organizations’ efforts to shape American policy on genocide recognition, aid, and relations with Armenia. Its argument treats lobbying as the mechanism that moved contested historical claims into foreign-policy debate.
A CSUN master's thesis in anthropology on 'ethnodoxy' — the fusion of ethnic and religious identity — among Armenian-Americans in Los Angeles, the largest Armenian community in the diaspora. Avetyan argues that the Armenian Apostolic Church has functioned since the fourth century as a unifying national institution in the absence of statehood, and that both its practical and its symbolic religiosity remain central markers of Armenian identity in the diaspora today. The study fills a gap in scholarship that had examined Armenian cultural identity without seriously weighing its ethno-religious dimension. Committee members included Vahram Shemmassian.
A historical-linguistics dissertation argues that Classical Armenian replicated Parthian lexical, morphological, phraseological, and syntactic patterns, including a tripartite periphrastic perfect.
A demographic study of Apostolic Armenians in southern Istanbul based on the c. 1907 Ottoman imperial census, supervised by the Ottoman quantitative historian M. Erdem Kabadayı. It is the foundation of Ohanian's later census work: the research it contains was subsequently developed into his 2017 JOTSA article and his 2020 Turcica article on historical GIS.
A privately owned eighteenth-century Armenian prayer scroll is studied through textual and miniature interpretation plus non-invasive spectroscopy, photography, X-ray fluorescence, and Raman analysis.
The dissertation places Sayat-Nova's multilingual songs inside Armenian and wider Near Eastern bardic traditions, then follows his twentieth-century scholarly and popular afterlife.
An orchestral dissertation responds musically to the Armenian Genocide through inherited survivor memory, loss, resilience, revival, and an appeal for peace.
A dissertation reads Micheline Aharonian Marcom's three novels through postmemory, tracing how imagination mediates inherited Armenian Genocide trauma into present literary remembrance.
A catalogue of Kayseri’s Armenian churches and monasteries reconstructs religious architecture from the mid-nineteenth century through 1915 and records destruction, neglect, and transformation after the Ottoman period. Demographic evidence places the buildings within the city’s changing Armenian presence.
Drawing on community histories, Armenian-language periodicals, and interviews in Lebanon, France, and the United States, the dissertation traces how post-genocide dispersion became a transnational diaspora divided between competing homeland-centered and diaspora-centered institutions.
The dissertation explains divergent Classical Armenian epenthetic vowels through sonority sequencing, extraprosodic sibilants, secondary stress, and contrasting consonant-resonant clusters.
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