Suny to Present History of Genocide at Mt. Holyoke

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass.—On Thurs., Feb. 19, Prof. Ronald G. Suny will present a lecture entitled, “‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: Explaining the Armenian Genocide,” at Mt. Holyoke College.

Cover of Suny’s ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide’
Cover of Suny’s ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide’

The lecture is a joint undertaking of the Department of Russian and Eurasian Studies, Mt. Holyoke College; the Departments of History, Modern European Studies, and Slavic and East European Studies, University of Massachusetts; Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Smith College; the Department of Russian, Amherst College; and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).

Suny’s most recent publication is ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015). Drawing on archival documents and eyewitness accounts, Suny’s chronicle of the Armenian Genocide explores the psychological factors as well as the international and domestic events that helped lead to genocide, a cataclysm that set a tragic pattern for a century of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Suny is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan; Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago; and senior researcher at the National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, Russia. The grandson of the composer and ethnomusicologist Grikor Mirzaian Suni and a graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University, he was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan (1981-95), where he founded and directed the Armenian Studies Program.

He is also the author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918 (1972); Armenia in the Twentieth Century (1983); The Making of the Georgian Nation (1988, 1994); Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (1993); The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1993); and The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (1998, 2011).

The talk begins at 7 p.m. at Mt. Holyoke College, Dwight Hall 101, 47 Morgan St., in South Hadley, Mass. For more information, contact NAASR by calling (617) 489-1610 or e-mailing hq@naasr.org.

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2 Comments

  1. The sculpture has been moved into the library Atrium for my exhibit “Go Where No One Else Will”: Mount Holyoke Missionaries in Eastern Turkey before and during the 1915 Armenian Genocide, on display until February 23rd!

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