In Argentina, Armenian Genocide seminar examines women, children and silence

For decades, Armenian Genocide studies centered on deportations, massacres, political responsibility and denial. That work was necessary. It documented the crime and responded to those who tried to erase it. But some voices remained harder to hear. Women who survived abduction, rape, forced marriage or forced religious conversion often kept silent. Children taken into Turkish households sometimes grew up without knowing their Armenian names, families or origins. Their stories were present in fragments, family memory, archives, literature, old photographs and, at times, on the body itself.

That is the field of questions behind “Between Silence and Memory: Women and Children during the Armenian Genocide,” a seminar organized by the Armenian Studies Chair at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. The course ran from June 2 to July 7 and was coordinated by historian Nélida Elena Boulgourdjian, one of the leading scholars of Armenian history in Argentina. Speaking with The Armenian Weekly, Boulgourdjian explained that the seminar came from a need to widen the frame of genocide studies. “We needed to deepen a dimension that historically had a limited presence in studies of the subject,” she said.