with Hourig Attarian, Melissa Bilal, Arpine Ghambaryan, Houry Pilibbossian, and Julia Cabral Tordeur
English
This roundtable brings together an intergenerational group of oral historians working in diverse Armenian contexts: Melissa Bilal, Houry Pilibbossian, Julia Cabral Tordeur, Arpi Ghambaryan, and Hourig Attarian. The conversation will focus on various facets of research creation in the projects the panelists have been working on, from photography archives, to documentary filmmaking, to creative writing, to music. Hourig will introduce and moderate the discussion.
Melissa will focus on the life narratives and expressive culture of Armenians displaced from Burunkışla, a village in Yozgat, central Turkey. There is a growing scholarly literature on Armenian genocide survivors who continued living in Turkey. Yet this literature rarely includes the accounts of those who stayed outside Istanbul in the decades following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. Drawing on oral history interviews conducted in the village and its diasporic “extensions” in and outside Turkey, Melissa will talk about the production of an embodied knowledge of the unwritten history of the village through everyday performances of storytelling and singing. Her talk will explore the multiple versions of narratives of escape throughout the twentieth century: From violence, from the physical space of the village, from a condition of being, from negotiating a livelihood side by side with the perpetrators and their descendants.
Houry will address issues of maintaining and losing archives in times of war and the role of visual anthropology and ethnography in creating a repository of a collective visual memory of the Armenian community of Aleppo that was forced to migrate a second time after the genocide. The challenges of building a community photography archive, ethical, ownership and copyright issues become focal points of reflection. How does the creation of “Haleb Album” (within the larger Hi Haleb archival project) bridge the gap and bring together the community and unearthed parts of Aleppo’s Armenian life that have not been documented, curated and accessible? And finally, what is the role of photographic archives in historical knowledge production?
Julia’s research focuses on the Armenian Brazilian community and the lack of studies on Armenian women’s experiences in Latin America. Her PhD project collects their oral histories, aiming to preserve these narratives through both written and audiovisual formats. She is currently developing a documentary at COHDS and will share a brief preview during the panel.
Arpi will present her ethnographic research project that explores the daily practice of coffee drinking among Armenian women living in eight different communities in Armenia. Her research is rooted in an earlier project she conducted which focused on the coffee drinking ritual of her grandmother and her neighbor. For Arpi, this project serves as a diary of a feminist researcher intertwining academia and the everyday, the personal and the public, the joy and the sorrow. She transformed her observations into short fictionalized stories, each capturing the emotional and cultural significance of coffee within these communities.
As we engage in a critical inquiry of the storying act itself in this roundtable–storying the narrator, the (researcher)-self, the memory, the process, the story itself– we ponder how our works speak to one another and construct a larger narrative.
Hourig Attarian is an Associate Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia (AUA). She holds a PhD in Education from McGill University and is a Core Member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. Visual arts-based methodologies are a core facet of Hourig’s research endeavours. Anchored in the blurred genre of life history and autobiographical inquiry, her work focuses on storying memory and identity through visual and narrative explorations. Her research-creation projects merge creative writing, photo collages, installations and performance, drawing together difficult memories and marginalized histories of violence within a framework of public pedagogy. Hourig teaches education, oral history, and gender studies courses at AUA.
Melissa Bilal is a sociocultural anthropologist and historian specialized in Music and Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Memory Studies. She is an Assistant Professor and the Promise Chair in Armenian Music, Arts, and Culture at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music where she also serves as the director of the Armenian Music Program. Her ethnographic research explores the role of music in the transmission of Armenian memory in Turkey, while her archival research is focused on the musical and intellectual history of Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. Her most recent book is the co-authored volume Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology (Forthcoming 2025) which unearths the lives and works of twelve Armenian feminist writer-activists in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts. Bilal is currently working on a biography of pianist and composer Koharik Gazarossian (1907-1967) and on her book project Injuries of Reconciliation: Music, Memory, and Everyday Survival of Armenians in Turkey.
Arpine Ghambaryan is pursuing an MA in Gendering Practices at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Communications with a minor in Gender Studies from the American University of Armenia. Her research interests focus on exploring the personal narratives of marginalized communities through oral history and visual modes of study. Arpine is one of the founding members of the Oral History Matters initiative at AUA, which seeks to challenge controversial narratives and bring oral history to the forefront of research.
Houry Pilibbossian is a sociocultural anthropology PhD student with a minor in Gender and Women’s studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a photographer and a researcher of Syriac-Armenian origins. Houry received an MA in social anthropology from Goldsmiths University of London and a BA in English and Communications from the American University of Armenia. She is the co-founder of “Hi Haleb-Հայ Հալէպ”– a digital archive about the Aleppo-Armenian community. She’s a founding member of Oral History Matters – oral history based initiative at the American University of Armenia. She is also a research assistant in a collaborative oral history project mapping traces and memories of genocide in Armenia’s urban landscapes.
Julia Cabral Tordeur is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in History, Politics, and Cultural Heritage at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) with a master’s degree in political science from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) and a bachelor’s degree in History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She also specialized in Collective Memory, Human Rights, and Resistance through the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). Julia’s research, titled “The Women who Survived the Desert: An Oral History of Armenians in Diaspora”, explores the memory of the Armenian genocide as a central aspect of Armenian identity, or “armenianness”, within the Armenian diaspora in Brazil. Her work involves collecting life narratives through in-depth interviews with women from these communities, aiming to capture diverse perspectives across various backgrounds. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), where she is organizing the audiovisual material from her interviews into a documentary format.
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COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.
