Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor to give annual Vartan Gregorian lecture at NAASR

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will host an in-person illustrated lecture by Dr. Houri Berberian and Dr. Talinn Grigor titled “The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860-1979,” on Thursday, May 8, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. (Eastern), at the NAASR Vartan Gregorian Building, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA. The program will be the fourth annual Vartan Gregorian Memorial Lecture at NAASR. This will be an in-person event. A reception and book signing will follow the program. With the newly published The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860-1979 (Stanford Univ. Press, 2025), Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women's organizations, the authors trace minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran’s central nodes of power, and the Irano-Armenian patriarchal institutions of church and political parties. Engaging broader considerations around modernization, nationalism and feminism, this book makes a conceptually rich contribution to how we think about the history of women and minoritized peoples. Berberian and Grigor read archival, textual, visual and oral history sources together and against one another to challenge conventional notions of “the archive” and transform silences and absences into audible and visual presences. Dr. Houri Berberian is Professor of History, Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies, and Director of the Center for Armenian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on late nineteenth/early twentieth-century transimperial Armenian history, especially revolutionary move-ments and women and gender. Her books include Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 (2001) and the multiple award-winning Roving Revolutionaries (2019). Dr. Talinn Grigor is Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on 18th- to 20th-century architectural and art histories through postcolonial, race, feminist and critical theories grounded in Iran, Armeno-Iran, Armenia and Parsi India. Her books include the winner of the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award, The Persian Revival (2021), Contemporary Iranian Art (2014) and Building Iran (2009). Vartan Gregorian (1934-2021) was a brilliant educator, humanitarian and friend after whom NAASR’s headquarters building is named. Born in Tabriz, Iran, he received his secondary education at Collège Arménien in Beirut, Lebanon, and graduated from and received a Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford University. After an academic career spanning two decades, including a period as Tarzian Professor of Armenian and Caucasian History at the University of Pennsylvania, Gregorian served as President of The New York Public Library, President of Brown University and President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. For more information about this program, contact NAASR at hq@naasr.org.

Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor to give annual Vartan Gregorian lecture at NAASR

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