The Hamazkayin Eastern Regional Executive announces the third installment of the Hamazkayin Cultural Retreat, to be held in Morristown, New Jersey from September 21-22, 2024.
The gathering will feature the following talks and workshops:
Knar Abrahamyan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Race at Columbia University
Lecture: Sonic Mobilization: Armenian Popular Music and the Artsakh War(s)
Jesse Arlen, Ph.D.
Director, Zohrab Information Center
Medieval Armenian colophons (յիշատակարան) workshop
Lillian Avedian
Journalist and Editor
Interviewing workshop
Lena Tashjian
Author, The Vegan Armenian Kitchen Cookbook
Armenian cooking and baking workshop
The program director of the Hamazkayin Cultural Retreat is Prof. Khatchig Mouradian (Columbia University).
The program will be held at St. Mary’s Abbey, 230 Mendham Road, Morristown, New Jersey 07960-5089.
University students and young professionals (ages 21-35) can register here. Registration fee ($100) includes two nights’ accommodation and meals.
Lectures and workshops
Jesse Arlen, Ph.D.
Director, Zohrab Information Center
Medieval Armenian colophons (յիշատակարան) workshop
This workshop will introduce participants to medieval Armenian colophons. A colophon (Arm. յիշատակարան, ‘place of memory; memorial’) is a note written by the scribe of a manuscript that provides information about the manuscript’s contents, makers (scribe, illuminator, binder, patron, etc.), and the conditions under which, and reasons for which, it was made. Participants will be introduced to the main features of this genre and its importance for historical, social and cultural knowledge of medieval Armenian society.
Jesse S. Arlen is the director of the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center at the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America and a research fellow at the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University. He earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2021, with a dissertation on the life and works of Anania of Narek and tenth-century religious developments in medieval Armenia. He has taught Classical Armenian at the University of Notre Dame and the HMML/Dumbarton Oaks summer language institute and lectured on the medieval Armenian historical tradition and medieval Armenian poetry at St. Nersess Armenian Seminary. He is the co-author with Matthew J. Sarkisian of Odes of Saint Nersess the Graceful: Annotated Translation (New York, NY: Tarkmaneal Press, 2024).
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Lena Tashjian
Author, The Vegan Armenian Kitchen Cookbook
Armenian cooking and baking workshop
Lena will show you how to make two recipes from her cookbook: Darehats (Bread of the Year), a delicious cake with a surprise inside, and Shepherd’s Dinner, a unique and flavourful salad hailing from Musa Ler. Participants will be split into groups to take a hands-on approach and will enjoy the fruits of their labor!
Lena is a recipe developer from Canada and the author of The Vegan Armenian Kitchen Cookbook. Her book, now in its fifth print, was shortlisted in the Regional/Cultural Cookbooks category of the 2021 Taste Canada Awards, which annually honors superior writing and publishing throughout Canada’s culinary community. She is now working on a new project, Cooking with Nene, that documents recipes and stories from Armenia, Artsakh and Western Armenia.
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Lillian Avedian
Journalist and Editor
Interviewing workshop
Lillian will conduct an interviewing workshop, during which she will share how she approaches interviews as a journalist. She will discuss the ethics of interviewing, including building trust with sources and conducting interviews with empathy while remaining objective and obtaining key information. Participants will develop skills in crafting questions, practicing body language, and following up with prompts that yield revealing answers and narrative stories. They will have the opportunity to practice recording interviews with each other.
Lillian Avedian is a journalist and editor based in New York focused on international women’s issues, conflict and LGBTQ identities. She is the assistant editor at the Armenian Weekly. Her writing and reporting on the South Caucasus, Middle East, North Africa and Russia has been published in the Armenian Weekly, Democracy in Exile, Girls on Key Press and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She holds master’s degrees in journalism and Near Eastern studies from NYU.
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Knar Abrahamyan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Race at Columbia University
Lecture: Sonic Mobilization: Armenian Popular Music and the Artsakh War(s)
Knar Abrahamyan is an assistant professor of music theory and race at Columbia University’s Department of Music. Her work examines the historical and political entanglements of cultural production. Her forthcoming book, Opera as Statecraft in Soviet Armenia and Kazakhstan, re-envisions Soviet music history by analyzing the power dynamics between the state and its ethnic and racial others. It explores opera as a contested imperial space through which the Soviet state pursued colonial subjugation under the guise of cultural modernization. Abrahamyan has presented at major national and international conferences, and her work on Soviet music and politics was published in the DSCH Journal and a collected volume, Analytical Approaches to 20th-Century Russian Music. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Research Fellowship in Moscow, a Metropolitan Opera Education Department Fellowship and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus Research Fellowship (funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs).
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