Virtual talk by Helen Makhdoumian, Ph.D., postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute. This event is organized by the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA and co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA and the UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies.

Thursday, May 11, 2023
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM (Pacific Time)

Broadly, this talk makes the case for the powerful potential of contemporary literature and art in imagining pathways forward for critical inquiry in Armenian Diaspora Studies. To that end, Dr. Makhdoumian will discuss her current project on what she calls “nested memory,” a theoretical rubric she proffers to conceptualize the narrative structure of the reactivation of inherited memory in the face of dispersion and the recursivity of collective trauma. More specifically, Makhdoumian illuminates literary depictions of inherited memories of removal—a particular kind of forced migration—that are nested into collective memories of succeeding experiences of upheaval and displacement. By working in a contrapuntal manner that delineates connections while naming differences, Makhdoumian answers the following questions: What happens when those working in the field of contemporary cultural memory studies recognize that inheritors of traumatic cultural memory can also be witnesses in their own right to succeeding events of collective violence? And, how does the field of contemporary cultural memory studies develop tools to make meaning of the narrativization of those acts of witnessing when such acts occur in context of the displacement of an already diasporic community?

Helen Makhdoumian is a 2022-2023 Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, she was a Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she also completed a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies as well as certificates through the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her public writing has appeared in venues such as Days and Memory, Kritik, and Grad Life (blogs at Illinois), and her articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. She is currently developing her dissertation, which won the Charles Bernheimer prize for best dissertation from the American Comparative Literature Association as well as the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s English Department Peer Dissertation Prize, into a book manuscript titled “A Map of This Place: Nested Memory and the Afterlives of Removal.