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Lost in Commemoration: The Armenian Genocide in Memory & Identity
May 2, 2013 @ 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm +04
The memory of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish identity will be the topic of this year’s annual commemorative lecture on the Armenian Genocide at the American University of Armenia (AUA).
Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör, the director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, will explore the topic in a live webcast from the Netherlands to be broadcast at AUA on Thursday, May 2 at 6:30 PM (Yerevan Time). The lecture will be broadcast live online here. A reception in the Akian Art Gallery will follow the lecture.
Dr. Üngör holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam and is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History of Utrecht University focusing on mass violence and ethnic conflict.
“The Turkish state’s official policy towards the Armenian Genocide was and is indeed characterized by the “three M’s”: misrepresentation, mystification, and manipulation,” explains Dr. Üngör. “But when one gauges what place the genocide occupies in the social memory of Turkish society, a different picture emerges.”
Dr. Üngör’s talk will explore the clash between official state memory and popular social memory. “The Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers,” says Dr. Üngör. “Even after nearly a century, as most direct eyewitnesses to the crime have passed away, elderly Turks and Kurds in eastern Turkey often hold vivid memories on the genocide.”
His most recent publication, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property, is a detailed accounting of all the property seized from Armenians during the Genocide to create the modern state of Turkey. Dr. Üngör is also the author of the award-winning book The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950, which examines the process of social engineering, mass violence and genocide the Young Turks and their Republican successors utilized as they tried to create a homogeneous Turkey. He is currently working on a book on paramilitaries in comparative perspective.
