NAASR CHISTMAS OPEN HOUSE TO FEATURE LECTURE ‎ BY LERNA EKMEKCIOGLU ON ARMENIANS IN THE EARLY TURKISH REPUBLIC

Dr. Lerna Ekmekcioglu, McMillan-Stewart Career Development Assistant Professor of ‎History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give a lecture entitled “Wishful ‎Thinking or Insidious Camouflage? Armenians Responding to the New Turkey (1923-1933),” ‎highlighting NAASR’s 2012 Christmas Open House on Thursday, December 6, 2012. The ‎Open House will begin at 6:00 p.m. and conclude at 11:00 p.m., with Ekmekcioglu’s talk set ‎for 8:00 p.m. The evening’s events will take place at the NAASR Center, 395 Concord Ave., ‎Belmont, MA.‎
Special Book Sale and 2013 Project SAVE Calendar Available ‎
Both before and after the lecture, NAASR’s bookstore will be open and feature a one ‎night only 20%-off sale, with additional discounts of 40% or more on selected titles. ‎Numerous recently published titles will be available.‎
Ruth Thomasian, Founder and Executive Director of Project SAVE Armenian Photo-‎graph Archives, will be on hand with the 2013 calendar “Armenians a Century Ago: In the ‎Homeland and Diaspora.” The calendar, as always featuring remarkable photographs from ‎Project SAVE’s enormous archival collection, provides a glimpse of the diversity of Armenian ‎life during the pre-genocide years.‎
A Look at Armenians in the Early Years of the Turkish Republic
Dr. Ekmekcioglu will be speaking at NAASR for the first time. Her lecture will ‎examine the previously under-studied Armenian community in Turkey in the first decade of ‎the Turkish Republic. ‎ How did Armenians respond to the establishment of the new Turkey ‎in 1923? Was this Republic really “new” for them? What can we learn about the early ‎Turkish Republic when we look at it from the perspective of its Armenian citizens? ‎
Focusing on 1920s and 30s Armenian spokespeople, intellectuals, and lay and ‎religious leadership, Ekmekcioglu will demonstrate that Armenian responses to the state’s ‎policies (homogenization, secularization, Westernization) included cooperation, ‎accommodation, and camouflaging, as well as certain forms of more overt resistance that ‎took the shape of calls to preserve Armenianness inside those spaces in which the state did ‎not care or dare to interfere. She argues that neither the Turkish Republic's policies nor the ‎Armenian responses were completely new. The Ottoman past mattered much more than ‎either group would admit.‎
Dr. Ekmekcioglu joined M.I.T. in 2011 after a post-doc year at the University of Michi-‎gan’s Armenian Studies Program. The holder of a doctorate from New York University, she ‎teaches courses related to the modern Middle East, with a focus on its ethnic diversity and ‎majority-minority relations. She is also affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies ‎Program and teaches courses on gender in the Middle East and North Africa. As the holder ‎of the McMillan-Stewart Chair she organizes lectures that pertain to women in the de-‎veloping world.‎
She is currently working on a monograph titled Surviving the New Turkey: Armenians ‎in Post-Ottoman Istanbul, which analyzes the ways in which survivors of the Armenian geno-‎cide who continued living inside Turkish borders crafted themselves a new presence to be ‎able to co-habit peacefully with the perpetrator society.‎
More information about Ekmekcioglu’s lecture, the NAASR Christmas Open House, ‎or NAASR and its programs for the furtherance of Armenian studies, research, and ‎publication may be had by calling 617-489-1610, faxing 617-484-1759, e-mailing ‎hq@naasr.org, or writing to NAASR, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA 02478.‎

Belmont, MA
November 9, 2012‎

Naasr