Remnants – Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide | Elyse Semerdjian & Nefertiti Takla
The Institute for Middle East Studies invites you to join Elyse Semerdjian and Nefertiti Takla for conversation about Semerdjian’s book, Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide. Remnants is a groundbreaking and profoundly moving work that explores the Armenian genocide through the traces left in the memories and on the bodies of its women survivors.
Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants, these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and—in what remains of those lives a century afterward—bones.
With this book, Elyse Semerdjian offers a feminist reading of the Armenian Genocide. She explores how the Ottoman Armenian communal body was dis-membered, disfigured, and later re-membered by the survivor community. Gathering individual memories and archival fragments, she writes a deeply personal history, and issues a call to break open the archival record in order to embrace affect and memory. Traces of women and children rescued during and after the war are reconstructed to center the quietest voices in the historical record. This daring work embraces physical and archival remnants, the imprinted negatives of once living bodies, as a space of radical possibility within Armenian prosthetic memory and a necessary way to recognize the absence that remains.
We hope you will join Elyse Semerdjian and interlocutor Nefertiti Takla for this important discussion about the history and legacy of the Armenian Genocide. All are welcome to attend this online event.
Speakers
-
Elyse Semerdjian is a social historian of the Ottoman Empire whose research focuses on the experiences of women and the empire’s Armenian subjects. She has authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023) winner of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) and the Institute for the Study of Genocide Raphael Lemkin best book prize awards. Semerdjian received her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and her Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University. She served as Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies in The Department of Near Eastern Cultures and Languages at the University of Chicago and was awarded a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship in 2016. In 2023-2024, she received a German Research Grant with the “Religion and Urbanity” Research Group at the University of Erfurt, Germany, to support new research projects on Aleppo. Serving both the Strassler Center and the History Department at Clark University, Semerdjian teaches Armenian history, including the history of the Armenian Genocide, and a mix of courses on gender, the Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire.
-
Nefertiti Takla is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University who specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Egypt with a focus on gender and sexuality. Her research interests include the role of race and gender in the historical development of capitalism, transnational discourses of crime and criminality, labor migration in the Mediterranean world, gendered violence, and global feminisms. Her first book manuscript, "Raya and Sakina: Femicide and the Coloniality of Gender in Egypt," analyzes how wartime colonial exploitation led to a major femicide in northern Egyptian cities in the early interwar era, and how the coloniality of gender shaped the prosecution and popular portrayals of the femicide.
