Hakem Al-Rustom

I joined the University of Michigan in 2016 as the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History in the Department of History, and hold a courtesy appointment in the Department of Anthropology.

Research Keywords

• Anthropology of history; silences and absences; afterlives of political violence; indigenous populations; settler colonialism; displacement and forced migration; storytelling; writing historical ethnographies; memory studies; museums.
• Critical Theory; Postcolonial Theory; Walter Benjamin; Frantz Fanon; Edward W. Said; Marc Nichanian.
• Post-Ottoman societies (Middle East/Balkans); modern Armenians; Turkey; France; Egypt; Middle Eastern Christians; Eastern Christianities and Islam; racialization of confessional identities.

Research

As a historian of silence and an anthropologist of history, my research over the past decade has centered on the modern Armenian experience, especially in the shadow of the genocide in Turkey and the subsequent diaspora in France. My book, Enduring Erasures: The Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide (Columbia University Press, Spring 2025), explores the unwritten histories of Armenian citizens in Turkey. This work examines the ongoing silencing and historical erasure of Armenian survivors through a process I term "denativization," despite their continued presence in their ancestral lands. It explores the convergence of Armenian and Turkish historiographies in muting the Armenian survivors’ narratives and investigates the systematic racialization and erasure of Armenians in Turkey’s post-imperial nationalist projects. Based on ethnographic and oral historical research in France and Turkey, the book critiques the writing of ethnocentric and nationalist history by positioning the fragmented episodes of the Armenian past as part of a global history of indigenous populations that continue to face annihilation, dispossession, destruction, and erasures in the wake of establishing settler and nation-states.

My research broadly seeks to interrogate settler colonial literature to situate state-building projects, the politics of “minorities”/“majorities” in governing population diversity, legally ambiguous populations, and the racialization of confessional identities. In addition to my work on Anatolian Armenians, I am interested in marginal populations such as Christians and Mizrahi/Arab Jews in the Middle East and Muslims in the Balkans and France. My work is anchored in critical approaches to the study of post-Ottoman histories and societies, bringing the historical context of the Balkans into shaping the contemporary Middle East.

My work has been largely informed by the critiques of Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said as I navigate ways of storytelling, politics of representation, and the authorship of texts in ethnography and historiography in the aftermath of political violence. Marc Nichanian's critiques of historiography have also informed my work and teaching.

In 2024/25, I will be chairing the Univeristy Senate Committee on the Economic and Social Well-Being of the Faculty (CESWF).

Courses Taught

Lecture courses:

HISTORY / ARMENIAN / MIDEAST 389
*From Natives to Foreigners: Armenians in Turkey and the Diaspora
Armenian history since the Lausanne Treaty (1923) onwards.

HISTORY 197
*Narrating Genocide: Armenian History through Literature and Art
A multi-genre mediums, ranging from historical accounts and literary masterpieces to artistic creations, creative non-fiction, and visual art, students will navigate the intricacies of Armenian experience of annihilation and survivor.

HISTORY / INTLSTD / RELIGION 209
Death, Immortality, and the Afterlive
A deep-historical, anthropological, and multi-species approaches to death. We delve into the depths of human history, spanning from the prehistoric era to the present day, in a quest to uncover the essence of our humanity.

History 202
Doing History
On the craft of "making" history; for history majors.

Seminar/Graduate courses:

HISTORY 430 & 594 / ANTHRCUL 430 & 558 / MIDEAST 480 & 595
*History, Memory, and Silence in the Middle East and North Africa
A historical anthropology course with a focus on the afterlives of the Armenian genocide in the context of post-Ottoman societies from Algeria to Greece.

HISTORY 407 & 594 / INTLSTD 401
Violence and (De)Colonization
By thinking through Frantz Fanon’s writings we juxtapose violent events and the racialization of otherness, that are rarely read together: the Algerian War of Independence, the Jewish Holocaust, the Négritude Movement, the Palestinian Nakba, and racism and settler colonialism in North America.

HISTORY 698
Tracing Ruins of Violence Pasts
How can historians and anthropologists recover violent pasts when the evidence lies in ruins, victims are silenced, and violence is systematically denied? This graduate seminar brings recent historical ethnographies written on Armenians, Kurds, Palestinans, and Cypriots into a methological and theoretical conversaiton.

(Hi)story-Telling with Walter Benjamin
On the writing of historical ethnographies in conversation with Benjamin's "The Storyteller" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

(*) Constitute the curriculum in Armenian history. Courses are crosslisted with Middle East Studies and satisfy the requirements for Armenian Studies concentration.

Publications

Enduring Erasures: The Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide, Columbia University Press / Religion, Politics and Public Life series (Spring 2025).

‘Internal Orientalism and the Nation-State Order: Turkey, Armenians, and the Writing of History’ in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 51, No. 4, 2020.

‘Returning to the Question of Europe: From the Standpoint of the Defeated’ in The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond. Columbia University Press, 2020.

‘Looking Backwards and Downwards: Walter Benjamin and the Non-European’ An introduction to Echoes of Walter Benjamin: On Tradition, History, and Revolution. Dar Hunna Elles, 2020 (in Arabic).

‘Rethinking the “Post-Ottoman”: Anatolian Armenians as an Ethnographic Perspective’ in Anthropology of the Middle East. Soraya Altorki, ed. Blackwell, 2015.

‘Diaspora Activism and the Politics of Locality: The Armenians of France’ in Diaspora and Transnational Studies Companion. Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, eds. Blackwell, 2013.

‘The Arab/Jewish Counterpoint: An Interview with Daniel Barenboim on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’ in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, 2010.

Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation. University of California Press, 2010 (co-edited with Adel Iskandar).

U-M Affiliations

• Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History
• Center for Armenian Studies
• Museum Studies Program
• Center for Middle East and North African Studies
• Global Islamic Studies Center
• Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
• African Studies Center