BELMONT, Mass.—On Thurs., May 3, Prof. Seta B. Dadoyan will give a lecture entitled “Rethinking Armenian History Through Paradigms of Interaction: The Armenian Experience with Islam as a Case Study,’” at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) Center in Belmont.
The Armenian experience in the medieval and modern Middle East is too diverse to respond to ideological demands and simplistic constructs. If from the beginning of their history, Dadoyan argues, the Armenians and their native land as well as their habitat spread from central Asia Minor and the Black Sea to the southern Caucasus and the Caspian Sea, to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt, then their history, too, is part of these locations and their peoples, and their world was governed by more or less the same laws that governed the region. In other words, things Armenian are also things Near/Middle Eastern and must be studied as such.
Dadoyan will discuss the several and often contradictory trends and close interactions on all levels that went into processes that, by their nature, do not meet the criteria of traditional and modernist Armenian narratives. She explores these in her massive, three-volume work The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World: Paradigms of Interaction, Seventh-Fourteenth Centuries (Transaction Publishers). The first volume, The Arab Period in Armīnyah—7th-11th Centuries, was published last year. This large project is the culmination of a long and hard journey into uncharted territories and two decades of research and publication.
Seta B. Dadoyan has taught at the American University of Beirut, Haigazian University, Columbia University, St. Nersess Seminary, and the University of Chicago. She is the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals and several books, including Pages of West Armenian Philosophical Thought (1987), The Fatimid Armenians: Cultural and Political Interaction in the Near East (1997), and The Armenian Catholicosate from Cilicia to Antelias: An Introduction to the Political History (2003). Her magnum opus is The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World: Paradigms of Interaction, Seventh to Fourteenth Centuries (2011-13).
The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World (vol. 1) will be available for purchase and signing the night of the lecture.
The lecture begins at 8 p.m. at NAASR, on 395 Concord Ave. in Belmont. It is free and open to the public. For more information, call (617) 489-1610 or e-mail hq@naasr.org.
I will love to have copy of these volumes.