Dr. Nora Lessersohn has been appointed the Nikit and Eleanora Ordjanian Visiting Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University for the Spring of 2025. She will be teaching a course, titled “Leaving the Ottoman Empire.”
The course will examine the experience of Ottoman American communities before, during and after their migration to the United States, with a particular focus on Ottoman Armenians pre- and post-genocide. Through close readings of the scholarship on Ottoman Armenian, Turkish, Jewish, Arab and Greek immigration, students will ask: what global forces compelled Ottoman journeys to America (e.g. economic opportunity, Christian imperialism, state-sponsored violence, interethnic strife)? And what ideologies informed the way these migrants were received in a new country (e.g. nativism, nationalism, Orientalism, philhellenism)? In answering these questions and raising new ones, students will also aim to understand how Ottoman American immigration stories both fit into and challenge the existing scholarship on “American immigration” as well as race, whiteness and citizenship studies. Throughout the course, special attention will be paid to the experience of Ottoman American immigrants in New York City through field trips, museums and other primary and secondary source materials.
This seminar style course (MDES GU4952), which will be taught on Tuesdays from 10:10 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at Knox Hall 208, is open to auditors as well as matriculating students. Registration for auditors begins January 13 and runs until January 17. Classes begin on January 21. The tuition for Auditors is $2,400 and for Lifelong Learners (people aged 65 and over) is $750. Registration for Auditors may be done online and for Lifelong Learners here. On this page, scroll down to the “Application Materials” section to find the Online Application Form link. For enrollment help, please call (212) 854-0268.
Nora Lessersohn is a historian of U.S., Ottoman and Armenian history. She earned her Ph.D. in History from University College London in 2023, supported by a Calouste Gulbenkian Armenian Studies Scholarship. In 2021-22, she was a Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History. She earned her A.B. in the Study of Religion at Harvard College and her A.M. in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, where she was also a Visiting Fellow in 2023-2024. Dr. Lessersohn has published articles on the memoir of her great-grandfather, Hovhannes Cherishian, and is now preparing a manuscript on Chistopher Oscanyan and Ottoman-American cultural diplomacy across the 19th century (and especially in Civil War era New York City).
The Ordjanian Visiting Professorship program at Columbia is made possible by an endowment established by the late Dr. Nikit and Eleanora Ordjanian in 1988. Previous Ordjanian Visiting Professors have included Levon Abrahamian, Vardan Azatyan, Peter Balakian, Melissa Bilal, George Bournoutian, Seta Dadoyan, Cevat Dargın, Roberta Ervine, Helen Evans, Rachel Goshgarian, Arman Grigoryan, Robert Hewsen, Ohannes Kılıçdağı, Armen Marsoobian, Khatchig Mouradian, Ara Sarafian and Khachig Tololyan.
The Ordjanian Visiting Professorship is one of several programs of the Armenian Center at Columbia, the organization that raised the initial funds to establish a Chair of Armenian Studies at Columbia in 1979 and which continues to provide funds for scholarships, library acquisitions, academic publications, lectures, conferences and symposia.
For more information about the Armenian Center at Columbia, please call Karen Bedrosian Richardson at (212) 949-1995. For more information on Dr. Lessersohn’s upcoming course, please contact her at nl2974@columbia.edu.
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Amazing news!!!