Antoura

with Selim Deringil

hosted by Susanna Ferguson and Matthew Ghazarian

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During World War I, the Lazarist college at Antoura, in the mountains of Mt. Lebanon north of Beirut, was taken over by Cemal Pasha to be used as an orphanage for Armenian and Kurdish orphans. Turkish feminist Halide Edib recounts in her memoirs that the time she spent as director of the orphanage during the war was among the happiest periods of her life. In this episode, Professor Selim Deringil discusses his new project, a film about the Antoura orphanage and its orphans during the war, painting a very different picture from that which emerges from Edip's memoirs. The film, entitled "After This Day," is produced and directed by Nigol Bezjian. View a trailer here.

STREAMING AUDIO

via Soundcloud (US / preferred)

via Hipcast (Turkey / Türkiye)

PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Selim Deringil is Professor of History in the Humanities Department at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Ottoman History, including The Well Protected Domains (1998) and Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (2012).
	Susanna Ferguson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Middle Eastern History at Columbia University. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled "Tracing Tarbiya: Women, Gender and Childrearing in Egypt and Lebanon, 1865-1939."
	Matthew Ghazarian is a Ph.D. student in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, African Studies. His research focuses on the intersections of sectarianism, humanitarianism, and political economy in central and eastern Anatolia between 1856 and 1893.

CREDITS

Episode No. 241
Release Date: 21 April 2016
Recording Location: Orient Institut, Beirut
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Turnalar Turnalar - Darulelhan Heyeti; Murat Kenarinda - Agyazar Efendi; Bozlak and Halay - Yozgatli Hafiz Suleyman Bey

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Halide Edib Adıvar, Memoirs of Halide Edib. New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2004.

Hülya Adak, Halide Edib ve Siyasal Şiddet Ermeni Kırımı, Diktatörlük ve Şiddetsizlik. İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2016.

Nigol Bezjian, After This Day. Film. Directed by Nigol Bezjian. 2016.

Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Selim Deringil, “‘The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed’: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51:2 (April 2009): 344–71.

Lerna Ekmekçioğlu,  Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016.

Nazan Maksudyan, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014.

Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Amy Singer, Christoph Neumann, and Selçuk Akşin Somel, eds., Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Keith David Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations' Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920—1927.” The American Historical Review 115:5 (December 2010): 1315-1339.

Keith David Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.