Sponsored by the Kurdish Political Studies Program.
About the Event
Before the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, the region of Van, in contemporary southeastern Turkey, held hundreds of active Armenian churches and monasteries. After the destruction of the Armenian community, these ruined structures took on new afterlives as they became part of the evolving environments and communities around them. These ruined spaces play a role in the everyday lives of the people who live among them and shape their historical understandings and relationships with the local history and geography. In this talk, Dr. Suni interrogates the afterlives of one abandoned monastery and examines how local Kurds imagine, narrate, and enact the politics of the past and the present through that space of material ruin.
About Dr. Suni
Anoush Tamar Suni is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Promise Armenian Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to coming to UCLA, she was the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, and a Manoogian Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. She is currently working on her book project, which investigates questions of memory and the material legacies of state violence in the region of Van with a focus on the historic Armenian and contemporary Kurdish communities. Her research was recently published in the journals Comparative Studies in Society and History and Anthropological Quarterly.
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