Zoom-based lecture by Jelle Verheij, Ph.D., with discussant commentary by Owen Miller, Ph.D. This event is organized by the Armenian Genocide Research Program at the PAI. This webinar is hosted by the Armenian Genocide Research Program at the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute with co-sponsorship by the UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the Ararat-Eskijian Museum.

Wednesday, May 31, 2023
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Pacific Time)

Over the course of three years in the mid-1890s (1894-1897), tens of thousands of Ottoman Armenians were killed in pogroms known as the Hamidian massacres—after Sultan Abdülhamid II (reigned 1876-1909). Despite being known contemporarily as "the great massacres" among Armenians and the importance of this period for Ottoman-Kurdish-Armenian relations, the massacres received very little scholarly attention, even by specialists in Armenian history, until the late 1990s. Only in the last two decades have research articles appeared, primarily case studies of individual massacres.

Dr. Jelle Verheij (University of Amsterdam) is the author of several works on the Hamidian massacres, and his research articles of the late 1990s were among the first on the subject. His Ph.D. thesis is a voluminous 800-page study that may pass for the first comprehensive monograph on the massacres. Dr. Owen Miller, the author of a thesis and several research articles on the Sasun massacre of 1894 and its background, will discuss with Jelle Verheij his findings and the need for revision of the traditional perspectives, touching on many of the key issues and players: the death toll, characteristics and motivation of the perpetrators, the roles of the Ottoman authorities, foreign powers and Armenian revolutionary parties.

Jelle Verheij, Ph.D.,  is an independent researcher (historian) specializing in the history of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, Armenian-Ottoman-Kurdish relations and historical geography. Since the 1990s, Verheij has worked on the Hamidian massacres of 1894-97 and is the author of several articles on the subject (1998, 1999, 2012) and a Ph.D. thesis, The Armenian Massacres of the Hamidian period, 1894-97. An Empirical Inquiry, Amsterdam University, 2022.

Owen Miller received his Ph.D. in International and Global History from Columbia University in 2015. Before joining the Bilkent faculty, Dr. Miller taught at Columbia, Cornell University, Pratt, Emerson, and Union Colleges. His primary fields of research are Ottoman-US relations, lowland-upland relations, and global histories of missionaries. He is currently working on a monograph on a US missionary family in Hawaii, the Ottoman Empire, and the US South.

Please click here to view a recording of the event. 

Sponsor(s): Armenian Genocide Research Program, The Promise Armenian Institute