The following announcement was written by the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute:

 The UCLA Promise Armenian Institute, in collaboration with the UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the 1939 Chair in Holocaust Studies, the UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies, and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will present “Uncommon Genealogies: Violence, Belonging and Memory in the Eastern Frontier” by Dr. Serap Ruken Sengul. The webinar will take place on Friday, September 10th at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time (1:00 p.m. Eastern Time) via the Zoom Webinar platform.

Registration for this webinar is required and free. To register, please visit the website. Once you have registered, you will receive a unique link to the Zoom webinar.

This talk engages a gender analysis of histories and memories of coexistence, conflict and violence in the Eastern borderlands of the Late Ottoman and Turkish Republican states. Tracing rituals of difference and relatedness that inscribed male bodies across periods of intercommunal cohabitation, state-centralization, the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish conflict, Dr. Sengul asks how an analytical focus on (male) gender and methodological orientation in genealogy may render connective formations and experiences of political violence in these borderlands beyond the limits of historicism and methodological nationalism.

Serap Ruken Sengul is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA. She is an anthropologist whose work focuses on gender and sexual formations of sovereignty, nationalism, kinship, violence, memory and displacement in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Dr. Sengul earned her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, and was a Manoogian Simone Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.