This talk engages a gender analysis of histories and memories of coexistence, conflict and violence in the Eastern borderlands of the Late Ottoman and Turkish Republican states. Tracing rituals of difference and relatedness that inscribed male bodies across periods of intercommunal cohabitation, state-centralization, the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish conflict, Dr. Sengul asks how an analytical focus on (male) gender and methodological orientation in genealogy may render connective formations and experiences of political violence in these borderlands beyond the limits of historicism and methodological nationalism.
Serap Ruken Sengul is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA. She is an anthropologist whose work focuses on gender and sexual formations of sovereignty, nationalism, kinship, violence, memory and displacement in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Dr. Sengul earned her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, and was a Manoogian Simone Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Sponsor(s): The Promise Armenian Institute, Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History,
Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law ,
1939 Chair in Holocaust Studies,
UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies,
NAASR