Manoogian Postdoctoral Lecture | A Captive's Testimony: The Lives and Lies of an Ottoman-Armenian Prisoner in the Bastille

Inside a hefty volume of multilingual documents stored in La Courneuve, France, there sits nestled a 60-page work written in early modern Armenian script. In his Manoogian Postdoctoral Lecture, Daniel Ohanian takes us into the genre-defying pages of this work, identifying the man (or men?) who produced it, the lies and truths that it contains, and the world that it reveals. Through it, we explore the religious politics of early modern global Catholicism, French-Ottoman diplomacy, and the historiographic benefits of focusing attention on the lives of particular individuals.

Daniel Ohanian is a historian of Armenians in the early modern Ottoman Empire. He is currently working on a cultural history of Catholic-Armenian contact in the c. 1700 Mediterranean and on the eighteenth-century travelogue of a merchant-turned-priest named Hovhannes Tovmajanian. Daniel's research has been supported by grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, among others, and has been published in Turcica: revue d'études turques, the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, and Genocide Studies International.

Zoom Webinar ID: 990 5623 7622

Co-sponsors: Department of History (U-M), Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies (U-M), Department of Middle East Studies (U-M), Center for Middle Eastern & North African Studies (U-M), National Association for Armenian Studies and Research

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Email Contact: armenianstudies@umich.edu