The UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History presents the inaugural Raymond H. Kévorkian Armenian Genocide Commemoration Lecture delivered by Dr. Harry Harootunian. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA, UCLA Department of History, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR, and the Society for Armenain Studies.

Thursday, April 22, 2021
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM (Pacific Time)

Registration for this webinar is required and free. Please click here to register. 

 

Harry Harootunian’s The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and its Unaccounted Lives is an attempt to reach an unattainable history by addressing the experience and memories of his parents, who escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916 and migrated to the United States to confront the magnitude of a second challenge of adaptation and economic security in an entirely different environment. Their afterlives in Detroit, where they raised three children, were marked by a void of silence provoked by what they had experienced and the loss they had incurred to configure a daily life continually mediated by the defeating historical effects of genocidal policies Armenians had been subjected to during the closing years of Ottoman rule.

Born in 1929 in the United States, Harry Harootunian is among the leading professional historians of East Asia, focusing on Japan’s early modern and modern history. He is the author of Marx after Marx: History and Time after Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2015) and Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan’s Modern History (Columbia University Press, 2019). He was formerly the Max Palevsky Professor, Emeritus of History and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, the dean of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, editor of Journal for Asian Studies, and co-editor of Critical Inquiry. His newest book is The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and Its Unaccounted Lives.

 

Harry Harootunian

Professor Emeritus, New York University

Born in 1929 in the United States, Harry Harootunian is among the leading professional historians of East Asia, focusing on Japan’s early modern and modern history. He is the author of Marx After Marx: History and Time After Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2015) and Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan’s Modern History (Columbia University Press, 2019). He was formerly the Max Palevsky Professor, Emeritus of History and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, the dean of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, editor of Journal for Asian Studies, and co-editor of Critical Inquiry. His newest book is The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and Its Unaccounted Lives.

 

Todd Presner

Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program and Ross Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature. Since 2018, he is Associate Dean of Digital Innovation in the Division of Humanities and Advisor in the Office for Research and Creative Activities. From 2011-2018, he was the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. He serves as faculty co-PI on the “Urban Humanities” initiative at UCLA. His research focuses on European intellectual history, Holocaust studies, digital humanities, and cultural geography. His publications include: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), which maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), an analysis of the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body; Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012), co-authored with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Jeffrey Schnapp, a critical-theoretical exploration of this emerging field;  (Harvard University Press, 2014), with David Shepard and Yoh Kawano, an exploration of digital cultural mapping using the HyperCities project as a starting point — click here for the downloadable version of the HyperCities book in e-scholarship; Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, co-edited with Claudio Fogu and Wulf Kansteiner (Harvard University Press, 2016), on the history of representations of the Holocaust and contemporary debates in the field; and Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press, 2020) with Dana Cuff, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Maite Zubiaurre, and Jonathan Crisman. He is currently completing a book tentatively called “The Ethics of the Algorithm: Computational Approaches to Holocaust History and Memory.”

From 2005-2015, Presner was director of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of city spaces. Awarded one of the first “digital media and learning” prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008, HyperCities is an interactive, web-based research and teaching environment for authoring and analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of cities. Project co-PIs included: Mike Blockstein, Philip Ethington, Diane Favro, Chris Johnason, and Jan Reiff. The HyperCities platform is not longer functional (due to changes in the Google Earth API); however, all projects are archived and can be downloaded as KML files for the desktop version of Google Earth.

“Mapping Jewish Los Angeles” (project director, 2011-present) — a digital anthology of 12 interactive exhibitions focused on the history of Jewish LA, told through archival collections, mapping, and data visualizations.

Sponsor(s): The Promise Armenian Institute, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of History, UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), Society for Armenain Studies.