UCI Armenian Studies celebrates the graduation of its first Ph.D.

IRVINE, Calif.—On June 15, the rather new eight-year-old University of California, Irvine Armenian Studies program graduated its first Ph.D., Bedros Torosian. UCI Armenian Studies was first established in 2015 through the passion, guidance and years of labor of Sylvie Tertzakian, who galvanized the Armenian community to support the establishment of the program.

Dr. Bedros Torosian with Prof. Houri Berberian

Prof. Touraj Daryaee, director of the Jordan Center for Persian Studies, and a community group helped support Armenian history courses and programming until the endowment of a lecture series and a chair in 2015, thanks to the generosity and vision of a few donors, especially Vahe and Armine Meghrouni and the Meghrouni family. In 2016, Prof. Houri Berberian became the first Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies. Her appointment was renewed in 2021.

Dr. Torosian joined UCI Armenian Studies and the History Department’s graduate program in fall 2019 to work under the mentorship of Prof. Berberian. A native of Lebanon who was introduced to the program by one of the center’s longtime supporters, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Chemistry Ara Apkarian, Dr. Torosian is a remarkable scholar whose dissertation, “Whiteness Across Waters: Domesticating Euro-American Racialisms and Masculinities in the Service of Ottoman Imperial and Communal Subalternities,” focuses on Armenian and Arab diasporic communities in the United States and makes significant contributions to multiple fields in Armenian, Ottoman and Middle East history, as well as diaspora, migration, race and gender studies.

For 2024-2026, Dr. Torosian was awarded the Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellowship in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. After careful consideration, he elected to join UC Davis’s History Department in fall 2024 as the prestigious UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, where he will revise his dissertation into a book manuscript. Congratulations, Dr. Torosian!