WATERTOWN, Mass. -- The Armenian Relief Society (ARS) of the Eastern United States is proud to announce that the anticipated Spring 2025 ARS Norian Youth Connect Program (YCP) will take place at Columbia University on March 1, 2025.
The event features talks and discussions with Rev. Dr. Paul Haidostian (President, Haigazian University), Dr. Elyse Semerdjian (Armenian Genocide Studies Chair, Clark University), Dr. Knar Abrahamyan (Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Race, Columbia University) and George Aghjayan (Researcher of Armenian demographics and population records).
Dr. Khatchig Mouradian will once again serve as the program director.
To secure a spot, students can register at www.arseastusa.org/ycp2025. The application fee is $50 and covers the program plus breakfast, lunch, dinner and the evening social. Overnight accommodations will be provided exclusively to out-of-town students. The registration deadline is February 21, 2025.
Below are the bios of the speakers and titles of their presentations:
Bio: Rev. Dr. Paul A. Haidostian was appointed as President of Haigazian University in 2002. His appointment followed a nine-year professorship at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut. He holds a BA degree in Psychology from Haigazian University, a Master of Divinity degree from the Near East School of Theology, a Master of Theology degree and a Ph.D. in Pastoral Theology from the Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ. In addition to his local and international leadership responsibilities in educational, ecclesial and ecumenical organizations, Dr. Haidostian teaches, lectures and writes in Armenian, Arabic and English on a wide variety of topics including Middle Eastern Christianity, Armenian identity, ecumenism, youth, education, social issues, peace and pastoral theology. He is currently the Acting President of the Union of Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Near East (UAECNE), Co-President of the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC) and President of the Armenian Evangelical World Council (AEWC).
Title of talk: 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 US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs).
Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair,
Armenian Genocide Studies, Strassler Center, Clark University
Title of Talk: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide
Elyse Semerdjian is a social historian of the Ottoman Empire whose research focuses on the experiences of women and the empire's Armenian subjects. She has authored "Off the Straight Path": Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023) as well as several articles on gender, Ottoman Armenians, urban history and law in the Ottoman Empire. Semerdjian received her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and her Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University. She served as Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies in The Department of Near Eastern Cultures and Languages at the University of Chicago and was awarded a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship on the subject of "Skin" in 2016. In 2022, she received a German Research Grant with the "Religion and Urbanity" Research Group at the University of Erfurt, Germany, to support new research projects on Aleppo. She will begin writing a history of the city's Armenian community from Ottoman rule to the present disappearance of Armenians from the post-war landscape.
Researcher of Armenian demographics and population records
Title of talk: Armenian Genealogy: Research Strategies and Resources