Hye Sharzhoom Armenian Action
Photo: ASP Archive
Staff Report
Dr. Ohannes Kılıçdağı has been named as the 17th Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies for the Fall 2020 semester at Fresno State. Dr. Kılıçdağı is a 2014 graduate of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, where he completed a Ph.D. titled “Socio-Political Reflections and Expectations of the Ottoman Armenians after the 1908 Revolution: Between Hope and Despair.”
Dr. Kılıçdağı was born and raised in Istanbul as a member of the Armenian community. His parents were born in a village near the city of Sepastia and he is a graduate of Getronagan Armenian High School (Azkayin Varjaran), where he has continued to participate in cultural activities.
Dr. Kılıçdağı has been a columnist of Agos newspaper in Istanbul since 2011. Agos is a trilingual newspaper established by Hrant Dink and his friends. Dr. Kılıçdağı follows the affairs of the Armenian community and its relations with Turkish state both as an academic and columnist. He has also participated as a speaker in many town hall meetings during the election crisis of the Patriarchate, between 2009 and 2019.
In Turkey, high school graduates enter universities through a central exam that is taken by everyone wishing to pursue a university degree. “I also took that exam and won admission to dental school,” said Dr. Kılıçdağı.
“However, I understood quite soon that my passion was for history and social science. So I took the exam for a second time and was admitted to the Sociology Department of Boğa-ziçi University, one of the top universities of Turkey and originally established as an American college in 1863.” Dr. Kılıçdağı later double-majored in political science.
Dr. Kılıçdağı has studied in the United States with a predoctoral fellowship (2011-2012) at the Armenians Studies Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was also accepted as a post-doctoral fellow by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University between 2017 and 2019.
Until the 2000s, young Armenians in Turkey avoided studying history, let alone the Armenian Genocide, as it was highly risky to talk and write contrary to the official history. However, it seems this pressure generated an opposite effect on Dr. Kılıçdağı, who turned to studying history and Armenian Studies as an act of rebellion.
Dr. Kılıçdağı has a broad research interest including Ottoman-Turkish history, be-ginning from the early 19th century. He studies the history of Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, especially the trajectory of military service of these groups in the Ottoman-Turkish army. He is also interested in questions of citizenship and minority studies.
Dr. Kılıçdağı has taught about the social and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic at Bilgi University in Istanbul. Dr. Kılıçdağı was acquainted with Fresno, albeit more as an imaginary place, as he has translated dozens of William Saroyan stories into Turkish, first published almost 20 years ago.
He “knows” Fresno from those early stories. Indeed, one of the saddest results of the ongoing pandemic for Dr. Kılıçdağı is that “it will not allow me to visit Fresno physically and so I will not have the chance to see Saroyan’s hometown. Who knows, maybe in the future…”
Dr. Kılıçdağı will be teaching a three-unit course in the Fall semester on “Awakening, Death, and Survival: History of Ottoman Armenians in Modern Times.” He will also give three public lectures. He gave the first one on September 18 on the topic of “‘Living Together Requires Dying Together”’: Conscription of Armenians into the Ottoman Army after the 1908 Revolution.”
Dr. Kılıçdağı is looking forward to his semester at Fresno State, but it is unfortunate that the pandemic has overlapped with his Kazan professorship and he will not be in Fresno in person.