UCLA Promise Institute announces 2022-2023 grant and fellowship recipients

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Promise Armenian Institute grants and fellowships are designed to support research across all academic fields, with an emphasis on or connection to Armenia or Armenians, and it is pleased to announce the 2022-2023 grant and fellowship recipients.

PAI POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS

Haley Tupper (M.D., Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, 2020) “Post-Semashko Health Systems: The Comparative Successes and Failures of Universal Healthcare (UHC) in the Former Soviet Space”

Under the mentorship of Dr. Shant Shekherdimian of UCLA Division of General Surgery, Dr. Tupper will evaluate Armenia’s and other post-Soviet nations’ successes and failures in expanding access to healthcare according to the WHO framework of key health system building blocks, to help guide Armenia’s universal healthcare (UHC) development.

Helen Makhdoumian (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2021) “A Map of This Place: Nested Memory and the Afterlives of Removal”

Under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Rothberg, chair of the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature, Dr. Makhdoumian’s research will involve a contrapuntal study of Armenian American, Palestinian American, and American Indian/First Nations novels and memoirs; specifically, using a rubric of “nested memory” to articulate the structure of the multigenerational transmission of memory in the face of the recursivity of collective trauma.

PAI ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESEARCH PROGRAM POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

Anna Aleksanyan (Ph.D., Clark University, 2022) “Gendered Aspects of the Armenian Genocide in the Experiences of its Victimized Females”

Under the mentorship of Dr. Taner Akcam, director of the PAI Armenian Genocide Research Program, Dr. Aleksanyan will write a monograph based on her dissertation, examining the gendered aspects of the Armenian genocide, in particular, the ways the Ottoman Armenian females were targeted for physical destruction, sexual abuse, rape, sexual slavery, forced assimilation, forced marriages, and forced prostitution.

UCLA PAI DISSERTATION YEAR FELLOWSHIP

Jennifer Manoukian, (UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) “Purism and the Creation of the Western Armenian Written Standard (c. 1780-c. 1900)”

Under the mentorship of Dr. Peter Cowe, the UCLA Nareketsi Professor in Armenian Studies, Jennifer Manoukian will complete here dissertation which explores the emergence of the written standard known today as Western Armenian and examines the intellectual labor that led to its acceptance as the dominant medium for writing and education among Ottoman Armenians by 1900.

UCLA PAI COURSE DEVELOPMENT GRANT

Anne Gilliland, Ph.D. (Professor of Information Studies; Director, Center for Information as Evidence) “Through an Archival Lens: Armenia, the Genocide and Diaspora UCLA Information Studies”

This interdisciplinary undergraduate course centers the nature and role of “the archive” in understanding past events and future trajectories affecting the Armenian people. Designed in collaboration with Dr. Marianna Hovhannisyan, it will use case studies and community engagement activities to teach students how to identify, compile, and critically read and respond to the multilayered dispersal, fragmentation, deliberate erasure, distortion and withholding of the Armenian archival record. Course content will be drawn from the instructors’ research engagement with official, community and family archives and other forms of memory texts across the Diaspora, historical Western Armenia, the Republic of Armenia, and the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh.