The Gender and Sexuality of Armenia: A Debut Conference

In April 2017 the Armenian Studies Program (ASP) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, held the Eighth Annual Graduate Student Workshop, “Gender and Sexuality in Armenian Studies.”¹ The workshop, organized by Jeremy Johnson, a PhD candidate in anthropology and history, and Kathryn Babayan, the director of ASP, is the first academic event in the United States that places Armenian studies in direct conversation with gender and sexuality studies, bridging what many of us in the field understand as a major gap. Armenian studies in the West has for a long time focused on the interrelated matters of genocide and diaspora. The systemic violence against Christian populations and later mass deportations and massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century—most notably the genocide of 1915—produced a large archive of objects for interrogation and have informed a great deal...