Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, has won the 2024 best book prize from the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS). Dedicated to the memory of her grandparents, Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide was published by Stanford University Press in 2023 and examines the Armenian Genocide through the lens of gender and what she calls “genocide’s body work.”
The selection committee offered the following words:
Elyse Semerdijian’s book Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide stood out as an outstanding contribution in a field of strong candidates for this year’s AMEWS Book award. The choice was unequivocally unanimous. The book distinguished itself on so many levels.
First, Semerdijian’s approach engaged deeply and thoughtfully with archival remnants of the Armenian genocide as a way of re-reading and reconstructing the history of the genocide, but also recuperating traces of the Armenian community in the genocide’s harrowing aftermath. Second, Semerdijian deploys the photographic record as testimony and as a close, sometimes personal reading of the Armenian community both before and after 1915. Third, Semerdijian brings thorough scholarly rigor to her analysis, but the tone throughout is of incredible intimacy, through her deft and sensitive treatment of her subjects. Fourth, Semerdijian’s book is rooted in the history of her own family’s experience of the genocide — the photographic prologue that opens the book — and she approaches her topic with scholarly objectivity, but also with a personal touch that lends additional depth to her scholarship. Fifth, the theoretical infrastructure of the book is deployed in a way that lends additional insight into the violence against the Armenian community and its displacement, partly through Semerdijian’s attention to the embodied dimensions of trauma — through facial tattoos, for example, on Armenian women’s faces as a means of assimilation into Bedouin and Kurdish communities.
Finally, this is a thoroughly feminist project, focusing on the effects of the genocide on women and children, looking at the embodied dimensions of trauma, and reading how the Armenian genocide impacted women’s bodies, their families, lives and communities past and present.
Remnants is an incredibly powerful document of the Ottoman Armenian community both before and after 1915.
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Congrats Prof. Elyse Semerdjian, for winning appreciation of your book,
I hope many will read your book and send their comments…
The cover speaks of what Armenian women went through pain and suffering,
It seems will never end till today…