Showing 12 of 12 matching publications (200 total) · catalogue updated 2026-07-22
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Toulajian, Sophie-Zoé, 2025
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2025), pp. 125–141 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0073
This article reconstructs the 1979 march from Lyon organized by Armenian activists in France demanding acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide. Toulajian argues that street protest had a performative impact, consistently inserting the genocide question into the French public sphere through a transnational repertoire of activism. She shows how the marchers embodied overlapping identities at once, French, Armenian, diasporic, and global, and how the mobilization responded to both local French circumstances and international developments. The study situates Armenian activism within the broader landscape of 1970s protest movements rather than treating it in isolation. Methodologically, it makes a case for connected histories and multiple timelines as tools for understanding diasporic political engagement. The article appears in a special issue on law, activism, and the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide edited by Julien Zarifian and Edita Gzoyan.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Moskovyan, Lusine, 2025
Պատմություն և մշակույթ / History and Culture, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 151–162 (Yerevan State University Publishing House); DOI 10.46991/hc.2025.22.1.151
Examines the situation created after the Armenian Genocide, when a large part of the Armenian population was settled outside the borders of the homeland. The article presents the 'Spiritual Armenia' (Հոգևոր Հայաստան) ideology developed by Dashnaktsutyun figures as the ideological foundation for consolidating the diaspora. It clarifies and analyzes the Armenian term 'սփյուռք' and reviews historians' positions on how the term evolved and was applied in the Armenian context. It then gives a comprehensive picture of the geographic distribution and demographic size of the Armenian diaspora during its formative decade, the 1920s, across the Middle East and the United States.
ThesisOpen Access
Tavitian, Nicolas, 2025
PhD thesis, The Open University (UK), Open Research Online
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.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Melkonyan, Nvard · Melkumyan, Yuliana, 2025
Journal of Political Science: Bulletin of Yerevan University, Vol. 4, No. 3(12), pp. 87–106 (Yerevan State University); DOI 10.46991/JOPS/2025.4.12.087
Examines both push and pull factors shaping Armenian repatriation in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Drawing on secondary analysis of statistics, sociological research, in-depth interviews, and focus groups, it identifies the political, social, and economic push factors driving Armenians out of Russia and Ukraine: fear of war, uncertainty, instability, deteriorating economic conditions. It then maps the pull factors drawing Armenians to the homeland: safety, cultural and social ties, a sense of belonging, a more comfortable lifestyle, and a desire to contribute to the country's development. It also documents the counter-pressures inside Armenia itself: an underdeveloped repatriation system, persistent security concerns, weak infrastructure, and low wages.
Journal ArticlePaywalled
Harutyunyan, Khachik, 2025
ARAMAZD: Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 19 (2025), pp. 225–236
Harutyunyan surveys scholarship on Armenian inscriptions and graffiti in the Holy Land, a corpus that begins shortly after the invention of the Armenian alphabet and continues essentially unbroken to the present. The densest concentrations are in Jerusalem, above all the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the Basilica of the Nativity, alongside Armenian monasteries and churches. Research in the 1970s and 1980s revealed a large body of Armenian pilgrim graffiti along the route to Sinai, with further inscriptions documented in Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jaffa and Ramleh. His central point is that despite a century and a half of collecting efforts, no comprehensive compilation of this epigraphic heritage exists.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Melkonyan, Armine, 2024
Armeniaca. International Journal of Armenian Studies, Vol. 3 (2024), pp. 179–196; DOI 10.30687/arm/2974-6051/2024/01/006 (Edizioni Ca' Foscari, Venice)
Reconstructs an episode in the history of the Armenian community of Manchester during the pastorate of Ghevond Vardapet Pirghalemian (1873–78), a philologist, poet, traveller and church figure from Vaspurakan. Drawing on the period press, Melkonyan examines intra-community disputes, cultural and social activity, and community attitudes toward their pastor. Using Pirghalemian's own notes and colophons, she also documents the works he composed or arranged while in Manchester: a dictionary of provincial words, a collection of seals, a chronology, and volumes of Armenian colophons, and locates several long thought lost in the National Archives of Armenia and the Matenadaran.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Tordeur, Júlia de Moraes Cabral, 2024
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2024), pp. 1–37 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0059
Using a micro-historical method and Brazilian archival sources — immigration dossiers, naturalization records, periodicals — Tordeur reconstructs the role of Mihran Latif, an Armenian immigrant among Rio de Janeiro's elite, in aiding Armenian Genocide survivors and promoting the Armenian cause in Brazil. The study foregrounds the smaller, often-overlooked Rio community against the larger São Paulo one, examining how local elites mobilized resources for post-genocide solidarity and how that shaped diasporic identity and collective memory.
ThesisOpen Access
Iskandaryan, Gayane, 2023
MA thesis, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); eScholarship
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.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Levenson, Lance, 2021
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2021), pp. 54–73 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0023
This ethnographic study examines how Armenian youth in Jerusalem construct their identities through inherited historical trauma and the pressures of contemporary conflict. Levenson draws on extended fieldwork at Jerusalem's Armenian school and participation in community life to trace how the genocide functions as the central axis of collective self-understanding, with young people declaring that everything in their lives connects back to it. The article shows how commemorative practices and diaspora activism become sites where inherited memory is actively reworked rather than passively received. Levenson demonstrates that memories are reinterpreted to construct novel identity narratives tied to an imagined Armenian transnation linking Jerusalem's small community to the global diaspora. The study contributes an unusually intimate portrait of one of the oldest continuous Armenian diaspora communities at a moment of demographic strain.
ThesisOpen Access
Fittante, Daniel R., 2018
PhD dissertation, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles (Chair: Peter S. Cowe); eScholarship
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.
ThesisOpen Access
Aroush, Rosie Vartyter, 2018
PhD dissertation, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles (co-chairs: Peter S. Cowe, Michelle Erai); eScholarship
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.
ThesisOpen Access
Avetyan, Madlen, 2017
M.A. Thesis, Department of Anthropology, California State University, Northridge (advisor Sabina Magliocco); xi, 147 pp.; handle 10211.3/192578
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.
