Survivors into Minorities: Armenians in Post-Genocide Turkey

This talk follows the trajectories of the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who remained inside Turkish borders after the signing of the 1918 Mudros Armistice (and during the Allied occupation years of Istanbul) and after the 1923 establishment of the new country as the Turkish Republic. How did the Kemalist state treat the remaining Armenians? What were Armenians’ responses to the new (but also old) Turkish regime? I will discuss multiple strategies Armenians —including feminist Armenians— improvised in order to cohabit with unapologetic perpetrators and survive the new Turkey.

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is also affiliated with Women and Gender Studies Program. Her most recent book, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out from Stanford University Press in early 2016.