Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide

with Elyse Semerdjian

hosted by Matthew Ghazarian

| How can feminist approaches to the body and embodiment change the ways we approach the history of violence? In this episode we discuss these topics with Elyse Semerdjian, author of Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press 2023). Rather than ask about the official intent, geopolitics, or international legal implications of this violence, Semerdjian shifts the focus onto the bodies, skin, and bones of Armenians targeted for removal and extermination. Her work sheds new light on the efforts to recover Armenians taken into Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish households in an attempt to rebuild the body of the nation; the tattoos that marked the bodies of Armenians among nomadic pastoralist communities in the deserts of the Jazira region; and the role of bones and bodily remnants in sustaining and complicating commemoration of the Armenian genocide.

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How can feminist approaches to the body and embodiment change the ways we approach the history of violence? In this episode we discuss these topics with Elyse Semerdjian, author of Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press 2023). Rather than ask about the official intent, geopolitics, or international legal implications of this violence, Semerdjian shifts the focus onto the bodies, skin, and bones of Armenians targeted for removal and extermination. Her work sheds new light on the efforts to recover Armenians taken into Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish households in an attempt to rebuild the body of the nation; the tattoos that marked the bodies of Armenians among nomadic pastoralist communities in the deserts of the Jazira region; and the role of bones and bodily remnants in sustaining and complicating commemoration of the Armenian genocide.    

Contributor Bios

Elyse Semerdjian is Professor of History and the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her research focuses on the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide, with a special attention to everyday life that centers the experiences of Armenians, women, and social classes typically left on the margins of history..

Matthew Ghazarian is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Amherst College. His research and teaching focus on environmental history, political economy, and communal conflict in the Ottoman Empire and the South Caucasus. His current work examines the links between material conditions like debt, drought, and hunger and widening communal divides in the late Ottoman Empire.

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Credits

Episode No. 596

Release Date: 22 September 2026
Recording location: Easthampton, MA

Sound production by Matthew Ghazarian

Music: "Qele-qele" and "Antuni" – sung by Armenak Shahmuradian, accompanied and arranged by Komitas Vartabed, courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Komitas

Images, bibliography, and captions courtesy of Elyse Semerdjian 

Further Listening

	Lerna Ekmekçioğlu	256 8/7/2016	Secular Dhimmis of the Republic
	Heghnar Watenpaugh	407 3/25/2019	Survivor Objects and the Lost World of Ottoman Armenians
	Zeynep Gürsel	502 6/9/21	Portraits of Unbelonging collaboration with AnthroPod
	Sylvia Angelique Alajaji	461 4/23/20	Music and Silence in the Armenian Diaspora
	Keith Watenpaugh	238 4/8/2016	The Middle East in the Making of Modern Humanitarianism

Images

Loutfie Bilemdjian was trafficked between three men, the third being a wealthy Turk named Mahmoud Pasha in Viransehir. She eventually came across one of Jeppe's agents who helped her flee to Aleppo. Source: League of Nations Archives.

Aghavni was described by Danish humanitarian Karen Jeppe as "The Little Bride." She fled the elderly man she was forced to marry one week after their marriage, making her way to Jeppe's orphanage in Aleppo. Source: League of Nations Archives. .



An in-depth story about Nargis Avakian’s ordeal in America adopted orientalist and racialized rhetoric to describe her defacement and restoration through tattoo removal surgery. Source: “How Science Cleansed Her of the Cruel Turk’s Brand of Shame,” Washington Times, September 5, 1920.

Select Bibliography

Ekmekcioglu, Lerna. Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016)

Sarafian, Ara. “The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide.” In In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, edited by Omer Bartov, with Phyllis Mac, 109–19. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.

Semerdjian, Elyse. Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023)

Tachjian, Vahe. Gender, "Nationalism, exclusion: the reintegration process of female survivors of the Armenian genocide," Nations and Nationalism, 15:1 (January 2009) 60-80.

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

Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).