News

Staff Report Armenian Studies Program Coordinator Prof. Barlow Der Mugrdechian announced that the Leon S. Peters Foundation has made a generous donation of $30,000 to the Armenian Studies Program at Fresno State for 2021. The Peters Foundation has donated over $240,000 to the Program since 2013. Leon S. Peters was respected as a businessman, civic leader, and philanthropist who lived ...

Staff Report Fresno State President Dr. Joseph Castro convened a meeting of the President’s Armenian Advisory Council in September. Members heard reports from President Castro, Interim Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities, Dr. Honora Chapman, from Prof. Barlow Der Mugrdechian, and from Interim Associate Dean Dr. Sergio La Porta. Members of the Council had an active discussion on ...

Dr. Ohannes Kılıçdağı Special to Hye Sharzhoom Armenians who survived the Genocide and continued to live in Turkey have not attracted much attention from diaspora communities until recently. Only in the last decade or so have some young academics such as Hrag Papazian and Christopher Sheklian conducted some research on the Armenian community of Turkey. The reasons for this neglect ...

Dustin Vartanian President What would you like to accomplish as an officer? I want our members to feel how I did when I first got involved in ASO. When I first got involved, I established a great group of friends and I always looked forward to every event we had. My goal is to make everyone feel as welcomed as ...

  Carina Tokatian Staff Writer “The ghosts, the people from our Armenian past, the things they endured, the unprecedented suffering and losses they bore, as well as their will to overcome—all of that shaped our outlook and our lives” stated Jack Chavoor, a May 2020 graduate of Fresno State’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Since the very beginning of his thesis, ...

Staff Report We digitized, now what? To answer that question, the Armenian Studies Program (ASP) was recently awarded a grant from California Revealed, a California State Library initiative, which will facilitate making the Program’s digitized collection of local Armenian-American music available online to the public. The grant supports processing and cataloging the materials collected during the public memory event, “Armenian-American ...

  Sosse Ann Baloian Staff Writer The Armenian Studies Program kicked off its first Zoom lecture in the Armenian Studies Program Fall Lecture Series on Thursday, September 3, 2020 by welcoming Dr. Christina Maranci to discuss her artistic interpretations of the Cathedral of Ani, in a talk entitled “Ani Cathedral, Its Sculpture, and Its Inscriptions Revisited.” Dr. Maranci acknowledged that ...

  Carina Tokatian Staff Writer “Observe your surroundings before looking afar” was the sagacious advice that Armenian-American writer Bedros Keljik recalled his schoolteacher, Hovhanness Tlgadinsti, imparting to his students. In his Armenian-American Sketches (Amerigahay Badgerner), Keljik’s writing stands as a manifestation of this maxim; he invites his readers to enter the vivid culture surrounding his experiences as an Armenian-American. On ...

  Arshak Abelyan Staff Writer The conscription of Christians and other non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire had been a topic of consistent debate within the 19th and early 20th centuries. Following the restoration of the constitutional regime in July 1908, Armenians were optimistic of this new push for equality in Ottoman society. “One of the important requirements of this political ...

  Christine Pambukyan Staff Writer Dr. Tamar M. Boyadjian, Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Michigan State University, teaches poetry and translation courses. Along with her teaching, Dr. Boyadjian is also an active scholar and wrote an award-winning book titled, The City of Lament: Jerusalem Across the Medieval Mediterranean in 2018. On Thursday, September 24, 2020, Dr. Boyadjian evaluated how ...