YEREVAN, Armenia — As the Fall 2025 semester begins, the American University of Armenia (AUA) is pleased to welcome Assistant Professor Dr. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz to the faculty of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS).
Dr. Cachoian-Schanz is a translator and literary theorist who writes on gender, racialization, and the limits of the “human” in the geographies of Armenia, Türkiye, and their diasporas. She has called these places, as well as Italy and her native New York, home. Dr. Cachoian-Schanz’s work approaches literary studies as an expansive field across media — including text, sound, and image — at the intersections of critical race theory, posthumanism, and queer/feminist studies, with translation, autotheory, the archive, and the animal as guiding frameworks. Drawing on Armenian, Turkish, and European-language literary and cultural texts of the 20th century, her dissertation, “From Kin to Kind: Armenian Racialization and the Mediation of the Human in the Late-to-Post Ottoman Period,” examines how the speciated category of the “human” was modulated through both its racial and gendered subdivisions as well as the emerging human-nonhuman divide alongside the late Ottoman border regime. In tracing these shifts, “From Kin to Kind” shows how bodies and spaces were constructed, contested, and undone within the multispecies lifeworlds of the late-to-post Ottoman Empire.
Dr. Cachoian-Schanz’s scholarly publications include articles on Ottoman racialization and its autotheoretical translation (ASAP/Journal, 2021; Encounters in Translation, forthcoming), lost “racial” attachments marketed by contemporary DNA-ancestry companies (Social Text, 2023), queer diasporic memoir (Critical Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetic of 1915, 2023), and Ottoman/Armenian indigeneity (Journal for the Society of Armenian Studies, 2023). Since 2015, she has been co-writing “Չünքüşաbaտum | Çüngüşabadoum: The Dictionary of (In)animate Objects and Tales of Hearsay,” a multimedia project with an Istanbul-based architect on shared family trauma, archival redactions, and relationality outside of reconciliatory frames. Her most recent collaboration with media philosopher Katia Schwerzmann focuses on the normativities of large language models and the trans possibilities of human translation praxis. In 2019, along with Veronika Zablotsky and David Kazanjian, she co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective. Since June 2025, she serves on the Advisory Board of the Fondazione Unicampus San Pellegrino’s Nida Centre for Advanced Research on Translation.
In addition to her academic work, Dr. Cachoian-Schanz is also an award-winning translator. Her first translation monograph from Armenian to English — Shushan Avagyan’s A Book, Untitled (Awst/Tilted Axis Press, 2023) — is the winner of several prizes, including English PEN Translates, the MSA Translation Prize, the Dr. Sona Aronian Translation Prize, and the Society of Authors’ TA First Translation Prize. Other translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, The Hopkins Review, with Skira Editore, and Encounters in Translation (forthcoming). She is currently working on two new translations: The Women of Zarubyan Street, Avagyan’s text/image novel co-authored with lucine talalyan (winner of the 2024 Anne Frydman Translation Prize), and Anna Davtyan’s Khanna.
Dr. Cachoian-Schanz joins AUA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she recently completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, in conjunction with Penn’s Middle East Center. She also holds a Laurea Magistrale (M.A.) in Southwest Asian Languages, Cultures, and Institutions and Armenian Studies from l’Università Venezia Ca’ Foscari (Venice, Italy, 2014) and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University (Istanbul, Türkiye, 2017).
Regarding the most anticipated aspect of her AUA experience, Dr. Cachoian-Schanz shared: “I look forward to learning from the students at AUA — they already have so much insight to share — and to collaborations with fellow faculty.”
Founded in 1991, the American University of Armenia (AUA) is a private, independent university located in Yerevan, Armenia, affiliated with the University of California, and accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission in the United States. AUA provides local and international students with Western-style education through top-quality undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs, promotes research and innovation, encourages civic engagement and community service, and fosters democratic values.