Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants, these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and—in what remains of those lives a century afterward—bones.

With this book, Elyse Semerdjian offers a feminist reading of the Armenian Genocide. She explores how the Ottoman Armenian communal body was dismembered, disfigured, and later remembered by the survivor community. Gathering individual memories and archival fragments, she writes a deeply personal history, and issues a call to break open the archival record in order to embrace affect and memory. Traces of women and children rescued during and after the war are reconstructed to center the quietest voices in the historical record. This daring work embraces physical and archival remnants, the imprinted negatives of once living bodies, as a space of radical possibility within Armenian prosthetic memory and a necessary way to recognize the absence that remains.

Elyse Semerdjian is Professor of Islamic World/Middle Eastern History at Whitman College and President of the Syrian Studies Association. She teaches a broad range of courses on the subject of gender, sexuality, social history, culture, and politics of the Middle East. A specialist in the history of the Ottoman Empire and Syria, she authored ” Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo  (Syracuse University Press, 2008) as well as several articles on gender, law, violence, and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

Semerdjian has received two Fulbright scholarships to fund her research in Syria. She has written the social history of the Armenians of Aleppo, focusing on the formative sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and the Journal for the Society of Armenian Studies and recently finished her term as book review editor for the International Journal of Middle East Studies. In the Spring of 2013, she was the Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies in The Department of Near Eastern Cultures and Languages at the University of Chicago. Her article “Naked Anxiety: Bathhouses, Nudity, and Muslim/non-Muslim Relations in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo” was published in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and won the Syrian Studies Association Best Article Prize in 2014. She was awarded a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship on the subject of “Skin” in 2016-2017. Her recent article, “Bone Memory: The Necrogeography of the Armenian Genocide in Dayr al-Zur, Syria,” Human Remains and Violence (2018) offers a preview of her forthcoming book, Remnants: Encrypted Bodies, Gender, and the Memory of the Armenian Genocide, under contract with Stanford University Press.

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress. He serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the project on Armenian Genocide Denial at the Global Institute for Advanced Studies, New York University. Mouradian is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918, which received the Syrian Studies Association “Honourable Mention 2021.”

COVID-19/BUILDING ENTRY POLICY

CUNY attendees must show proof of vaccination by presenting a valid CUNY Access Pass through the CLEARED4 health validation platform upon entry. Non-CUNY visitors will need to show proof of ID by presenting a valid government-issued photo document. See the full Building Entry Policy for more information.