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Dr. Ari Sekeryan will speak on “The Survivors: Armenian Orphans and Refugees After the First World War (1918-1923)” at 7:30pm on Thursday, March 5, 2020, in the University Business Center, Alice Peters Auditorium, Room 191 on the Fresno State campus. The presentation is part of the Spring 2020 Lecture Series of the Armenian Studies Program and is supported by the Clara Bousian Bedrosian Fund.

Dr. Sekeryan was appointed the 16th Henry S. Khanzadian Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies for the Spring 2020 semester and the March 5 lecture will be his second public presentation of the semester, Massis Post reports.

Following the First World War and the Armenian Genocide, protecting the lives of Armenian orphans and refugees was the greatest challenge that the community leadership faced. During the Armistice period, with the help of the Allied Powers and humanitarian aid organizations, thousands of Armenian orphans and refugees were rescued and brought back to community life. The lecture presents the story of Armenian orphans and refugees by employing Armenian and Ottoman Turkish media sources published in Istanbul and Anatolia during the Armistice period. It explores the nature of the aid campaigns organized by the community leadership and the importance of the contribution of the Armenian intellectuals, press and the community members to these aid campaigns.

Dr. Sekeryan will give his final public lecture on “The Armenian Patriarchate, Politics and the Postwar Settlement in Istanbul: the Story of Patriarch Zaven, on Thursday, April 2.

Dr. Sekeryan graduated from the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, defending his dissertation entitled, “The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire after the First World War (1918-1923).” In the 2018-2019 academic year, Dr. Sekeryan was an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Institute for Research in the Humanities. Sekeryan was a Visiting Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Yerevan State University (summer of 2018) and a Research Assistant in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford in 2016.