CAS Workshop. 14th Annual International Graduate Student Workshop in Armenian Studies: “The Archive in Theory and Practice in Armenian Studies”

Over the years, the Center for Armenian Studies has fostered dialogue with graduate students from around the globe through our annual graduate student workshops. Together with our faculty, graduate students, and visiting and postdoctoral fellows, we have charted new scholarly territory in Armenian Studies through these collective efforts.

This year’s workshop seeks to uncover the ways scholars engage with archives in their work in Armenian Studies research, both in theory and in practice. While “the archive” in humanities and social science scholarship is often invoked through metaphorical and conceptual terms to mean history or canon as a whole, this workshop encourages applicants to both seriously engage with, and play with the bounds of, archival theory.

For instance, how might we expand our notion of what the archive is, how it is formed, and by whom it is shaped? In what ways do formal and institutional archives need to be rethought in order to better represent the Armenian community, or subsets of the Armenian community? In what ways might the Western construction of archives hinder or preclude preservation of a displaced or destroyed Armenian history? What practical challenges are faced by scholars undertaking archival research or using primary sources, and what new solutions or innovations are being proposed to overcome them? This workshop seeks presentations that address these questions, ask new ones, or are exploring an entirely different direction for archival research in Armenian Studies. Applicants should engage with archives in a meaningful way, yet need not be steeped in archival literature; this conference seeks to engage scholars working with “archives” in ways they themselves deem significant.

Topics addressed may include, but are not limited to:

Politics of collecting and recordkeeping
Primary source usage in Armenian institutions
Reimagining or redefining formal and institutional archives
Gaps, silences, deletions, or omissions in existing archives
Displacement and/or rebuilding of archives or archival institutions
Use and misuse of primary sources
Practical challenges and solutions to archival access
Metadata and finding aids of Armenian records and collections
Categorization and organization
Curatorial practices of Armenian records
Materiality
Ephemerality and preservation
Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic archives
Oral history, storytelling, and narrative tradition
Digital archives and emerging technologies
Public history, exhibition, access, or exposure
Legal policies and governance
The formation of a contemporary archive
Personal reflections on primary source use
Archival futures

This workshop, sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Center for Armenian Studies and funded by the Manoogian Foundation, is organized by Emma Avagyan (PhD student in Middle East Studies), Nazelie Doghramadjian (PhD student in Information Studies), and Allison Grenda (PhD student in the History of Art). For questions, please email armenianstudies@umich.edu.

Register here: https://umich.zoom.us/j/97067599569