LIVE! Colloquium on Genocide & Literature: Israeli and Armenian Comparative Perspectives

Panel 1 – Moderator  – Nareg Seferian

Arto Vaun – Standing in the Doorway: The Poet Between Languages, Between Worlds

Yael Ben-Zvi Morad  – Autobiographie de personne:  Perceptions of Human Identity in Autobiographies by Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants

Khachik Gasparyan – Psychotraumatic Elements of Armenian Identity: Loss andRecovery

Roy Greenwald  – The Transmissibility of Violence: The Pogrom Stories of Lamed Shapiro  

Panel 2 – Moderator – Greg Areshian

Haim Weis – The Bar Kosibah revolt and the Rewriting of National Tragedy

Ashot Voskanyan – Two ways to speak about the Armenian Genocide: Is the genocide trauma insurmountable?

Peter Sh. Lehnardt  –  “God, Do Not Be Silent Over My Blood’ – Narrative and Poetic Responses to the Persecution of Jewish communities during the First Crusade

Panel 3 – Moderator  – Catherine Buon

Vahram Danielyan – Kars as a Novel Space According the Novels of Orhan Pamuk and Yeghishe Charents

Amos Goldberg – Three Forms of Post-Genocidal Violence in Beni Wircberg’s Memoir

Siranush Dvoyan –The Crisis of Identity in Diaspora-Armenian Literature. 

Presentation by Ora Ahimeir, From Aleppo to Jerusalem – a quest for refuge and rest – the writer’s view

Closing Remarks

Three Forms of Post-Genocidal Violence in Beni Wircberg’s Memoir

Amos Goldberg is a senior lecturer in Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His major fields of research are cultural history of the Jews in the Holocaust, Holocaust historiography, and Holocaust memory in a global world. His book on diary writing during the Holocaust came out by Heksherin in 2012 and is now writing a book on post-Holocaust Jewish memoirs.

Autobiographie de personne:  Perceptions of Human Identity in Autobiographies by Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants

Dr. Yael Ben-Zvi Morad is a researcher of Israeli and Palestinian Cinema and Literature. She teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is the author of the books Patricide: Gender and Nationalism in Palestinian Cinema and Wedding in the Snow.

“God, Do Not Be Silent Over My Blood’ – Narrative and Poetic Responses to the Persecution of Jewish communities during the First Crusade

Dr. Peter Sh. Lehnardt, senior lecturer of Hebrew Medieval Literature with research focuses on Hebrew liturgical poetry and secular genres common to majority cultures of the Christian hemisphere around the Mediterranean.

The Bar Kosibah revolt and the Rewriting of National Tragedy

Dr. Haim Weiss is a senior lecturer at the department of Hebrew literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His main field of research is Rabbinic literature and currently he is writing a book on the image of Simon Bar-Kosibah (better known as Bar Kochva) in Jewish history and culture.

The Transmissibility of Violence: The Pogrom Stories of Lamed Shapiro  

Roy Greenwald teaches Modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He work currently on the literary presentations of the Pogroms in Yiddish and Hebrew Literature of the late 19th and the early 20th century.

From Aleppo to Jerusalem – a quest for refuge and rest – the writer’s view

Ora Ahimeir, novelist and editor, founder and former director of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.  Honored resident of Jerusalem (since 2011). Her new Hebrew novel on the Armenian genocide is due in October 2016.

Dr. Ashot Voskanyan

Ashot Voskanyan is a Lecturer at the American University of Armenia and Senior Lecturer at YSU. He is author of monograph “The Inevitability of Understanding: Essays on the history of philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction” (2015, in Armenian). He is an Ambassador, Director of Asia-Pacific and Africa Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, RA.

Dr. Catherine Buon

Dr. Buon is the Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Co-Director of the Center for Research in Applied Linguistics. She is an applied linguist and teacher trainer. She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics and her MA in French and Francophone Literature from Louisiana State University.

Dr. Gregory Areshyan

Gregory Areshian is the Director of Research Program in Armenian Archaeology and Ethnography of the University of California.  He is currently teaching several courses at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia. The courses he teaches within AUA Summer Program are very popular among students.

Dr. Harutyun Marutyan

Leading Researcher of Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences, Armenia; Doctor of Sciences (History), Social/Cultural Anthropologist, IREX/RSEP, Fulbright, USHMM/CAHS, DAAD Alumni.

Dr. Khachatur Gasparyan

Khachik Gasparyan is the Chair of Medical Psychology department at the M. Heratsi State Medical University founded in 2007. He is the Clinical director of “Intra” Mental Health Centre and is currently a Lecturer at the American University of Armenia.

Lect. Nareg Seferian

Nareg Seferian is an AUA instructor, researcher, and writer. He was born and raised in New Delhi and received his higher education in Yerevan, Santa Fe, Boston, and Vienna. He worked at the Galust Gulbenkian Foundation. He is member of 100 Years, 100 Facts Project.

Dr. Siranush Dvoyan

Siranush Dvoyan is a literary critic and an associate professor of Comparative Literature at Yerevan State University. She is also an adjunct lecturer at the American University of Armenia. Since 2011 she is the co-editor of www.arteria.am, a platform for cultural criticism. Her research interests include revolutionary articulations and new diasporic experiences in literature.

Dr. Thomas Samuelian

Tom Samuelian is s the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Legal Research Center. He earned the J.D. from Harvard Law School, and holds the Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Samuelian is the founder and managing attorney of Arlex International Ltd., a leading law firm in Yerevan, Armenia.

Dr. Vahram Danielyan

Vahram Danielyan is a literary critic. He received his Ph.D. from Yerevan State University in the field of Armenian Philology, in 2009. Now he holds a position of assistant professor at YSU, Department of Modern Armenian Literature. V. Danielyan also teaches a course of Armenian Language and Literature at American University of Armenia. During 2010-2011 academic year he fulfilled his post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor /USA.

Sr. Lect. Arto Vaun

Arto Vaun’s first book of poems, Capillarity, was published in 2009. He is the founder and editor of Locomotive, a new magazine of international poetry and prose. He is a Senior Lecturer at the American University of Armenia where he recently founded the Center for Creative Writing. His poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Bolton in the UK.